If that was something expected to happen, then the phenomenon is not really unusual. Does the claim get its force only because it is joined to the other claims?

1. What does that have to do with anything? Against the background of what was accepted at that time (on your claim that there were no commanding gods), such an invention would have been unusual, and therefore it is unlikely that this was an invention.
2. I wrote that after one reaches the conclusion that there is a God, then it is to be expected that He would also reveal Himself. What does that have to do with the discussion? 3. Beyond that, it is expected that He would reveal Himself, but not necessarily more than once, so even if it is expected that still doesn’t mean the event is not unusual.
4. And indeed, this claim is only fit to be combined with others.

1. Was this idea really foreign relative to that period—that a monotheistic God reveals Himself? Was it ahead of its time?
2. Why is it not expected that He would reveal Himself more than once?

1. I don’t know. You said that. I think so.
2. I didn’t say it isn’t expected. Not necessarily the opposite. In practice He revealed Himself once.

Just to make sure I understood correctly.
A unique phenomenon in history that has an explanation and was expected to happen—is it still unique?
Like antisemitism, which has an explanation for why it happened, but is still unique.

That’s a matter of definition. A phenomenon that is expected to happen can still be unusual if it happens only once. That is in the statistical sense of unusualness.
But this has nothing to do with our discussion in any way. I said the phenomenon is expected: assuming there is a God, it is reasonable that He would reveal Himself. The question whether there is or isn’t is a different question.
I don’t understand what is unclear here.

On the issue of how foreign the idea of a revealing God was in that period, Yohanan Muffs expands on it in The Personhood of God quite near the beginning (and there too there is some attempt to remove this as an inevitable development):

“In Israel, by contrast, the process of personalization continues and passes into more advanced stages. The divine personality, instead of becoming foolish or pale, as happened in Greece and India, becomes so strong that nature appears to be ruled by it, and thereby nature is transformed from a primordial reality into a product of the divine, of personal will. While the Greeks, by means of their science, return to the more primitive ‘Moira,’ the Israelites advance toward personality—a trend the religious world had already embraced. In the human sense, Israel represents progress and Greece regression. It cannot be explained developmentally why personality became so strong in Israel that it was capable of conquering nature. Could the breakthrough of personality have occurred elsewhere? Was it inevitable? These questions too have no answer. But if we assume that personality is part of the built-in logic of the human spirit, then its appearance was apparently only a matter of time. To use Teilhard de Chardin’s method, a new type bursts forth and tests itself in every possible variation. Each of the great religions of antiquity is an expression of the ideal, an experiment meant to uncover the truth regarding existence. The greatness of the religion of Israel, unlike the others, is its focus on the idea of the personality of God. This idea is psychologically inevitable; it is built into the human soul. It is, in other words, revelation.

Why did the idols not become possessed of more meaningful personality? What would have happened if they had developed that way? Their personalization is selfish and egocentric in essence. They are concerned solely with satisfying their own personal needs. They do not yet know the secret of positive relation; instead they compete for power and join together only in times of cosmic crisis. Once the crisis passes, the coalition dissolves and the fighting and competitiveness return. (At this point he rejects the display of personality as stemming specifically from monotheism. That is only a necessary but not sufficient condition): ‘The unification of the pantheon does not necessarily produce a deity less centered on itself. Akhenaten’s one god is not overly concerned with human souls; if he relates to humanity at all, it is only to the king and his immediate family. He is not the God of morality but the god of the sun. Aristotle’s unmoved mover is the perfect example of divine lack of interest and self-absorption. Therefore, the oneness of the God of Israel does not explain His attraction to the interpersonal or, by extension, His moral character… The pagans did not know of a permanent interpersonal relationship with an entire human community initiated by God, relationships founded on a mutual stipulation of conditions sealed by covenant and oath, relationships established through the mediation of a prophet who conveys both divine love and divine wrath. This combination of elements is unique to biblical Israel. Each and every element arouses deep feeling. For example, a pagan god may choose a certain king in order to derive some benefit from him, while ordinary mortals are unable to touch divine intimacy. The relationship between king and god is at best loose, and there is no guarantee that when the king dies the god will bestow his favor on the king’s heirs as well. Divine relationships are subject to the same instability (chaos) that always threatens the stability of human relationships as well as the stability of the cosmos itself. Indeed, from the Mesopotamian point of view, nothing but human law is stable… In Israel the relationship between God and man is structured as stable and sealed in law and oath. It is eternal, since all future generations are included within it. Moreover, this is not a relationship with a king who can be adorned with titles of pseudo-divinity, such that the love remains more or less “in the family,” but with all the people. Thus, while (in Israel—G.S.) the relationship is all-embracing, it remains personal because it includes a covenant with each individual separately. As Kaufmann pointed out, the laws of the Torah are formulated in the second person singular… As Walter Eichrodt also noted, this democracy of concern is indeed remarkable. Now the human being as human being stands forever at the center of divine concern.” End quote.

But I have an interesting question for you on this very issue, our master and teacher Rabbi Michi, who surrounds and fills all places: in several places you wrote that you do not dismiss the other religions, and that it is possible God also revealed Himself in the emergence of Christianity and Islam—not in a public revelation, but in providential guidance over the enterprise, or alternatively by prophecy to the founder of the religion (for otherwise, for example, the Qur’an would be one huge fabrication or a prolonged hallucination—which is possible of course, but not necessary). So why is it specifically in Judaism that you require the Creator to reveal Himself publicly and otherwise you are not willing to keep the Torah? You wrote to the author of “Was There or Was There Not” (who really does believe in the Sinai event, only he writes for the drawer that maybe it wasn’t… or maybe it was… or maybe it wasn’t…) that “If indeed my conclusion were that the Sinai event never happened in its historical sense, whatever that may mean, then I do not see how I could be obligated to the Torah and its commandments. If the Holy One, blessed be He, did not reveal Himself and give us the Torah, or at least some kernel of it, then who on earth invented it? And in general, why should I owe that unknown inventor anything? Why should I sacrifice my life for a myth invented by human beings and not received from Heaven? Why should I weigh every step of my life according to criteria whose basis is some unclear invention of someone said in the name of the Creator of the world? Can this be a serious proposal for a rational person?!” And here I am astonished like an egg against a wall. Why, if God chose to reveal Himself to prophets throughout the First Temple period, is that not from Heaven? What is the difference between that and the way He chose to speak to the other nations? (I am setting aside the superiority of Israel, which can clearly be retained even in light of this thesis.) See what a wonder—that both Christianity and Islam, as well as mass religions in the Far East, present their commandments and rituals as God’s commandments without ever imagining a public revelation to the entire people (this argument is what underlies Deuteronomy chapter 4, but that would take us too far afield).
Now let us do a thought experiment: if there is truth in these revelations to the founding prophets of those religions (Buddha, Moses, Muhammad), then the Creator’s aim was achieved even without revealing Himself to an entire people not fit for such prophetic revelation (and perhaps all the better, since such a state of consciousness might have permanently disrupted the people’s proper conduct). We see as a fact that these religions spread successfully, gained believers, and influenced humanity. So what problem would there be for the Creator to guide the Jewish people in precisely this way too, so that they would accept His commandments without Him actually revealing Himself to the whole people—as the academic research assumes?

Is your difficulty because the system of commandments demands more than the other religions? Because it contradicts reason, and for that you need a more serious and certain level of obligation? (In Islam there are suicide bombers! because of this belief.) Or would your doubt also prevent you from putting on the turban for the sake of a religion whose god chose to reveal himself only to one madman?

Gil, full of knowledge like a pomegranate and never disappointing. Really interesting.

As for your question, there are two answers:
1. There is a difference between saying I do not rule something out and being obligated by it. I cannot rule out a private revelation, but for me it is not valid enough to obligate me by it (certainly not at that level). When someone comes and tells me that a miracle happened to him or that someone was revealed to him, I cannot tell him he is a liar. But one should be wary, and certainly I would not obey every instruction he issues.
2. After there was a revelation to Israel, I now know that there is a God, and I am willing to accept claims about the transmission of commands not in public. But the actual proof that He exists and reveals Himself requires a public revelation.

Thank you very much! I’ll turn it over in my mind. I’m writing about it, and when it’s ready I’ll send it to you. On the matter of obligation, I accept your position, and likewise regarding the foundation of the initial revelation. Still, my feeling is that at least from His side, if not from ours, the main thing is what brought the people of Israel into a collective covenant with Him even without the revelation. The belief in a God who reveals Himself publicly is more important than its realization in the historical past of the believing people (who formulated this belief over generations). It carries an enormous message about God’s individual relationship, about the mutual responsibility of the whole people, about the democratization of knowledge and of prophecy, and more. For me it is all one whether God—from His side, again—brought the Jews to these conclusions through a real revelation or through theological and literary development. His revelation can be identified—though not without sophistication and acrobatics—in the very Jewish genius that reached the sublime message of the Hebrew Bible and/or in prophecies that were fulfilled, teaching of a mysterious foundation hovering over the people as well as over the book that accompanies its existence. It is not proven and convinces only the convinced, but if the Creator—from His side—can persuade other religions this way, even without revelation, then perhaps He could have done the same with the Jews. And indeed they rely on Judaism (the East does not, admittedly), but in the same way Judaism too could have relied on Judaism—by spreading the story of collective revelation thanks to ancient traditions about such an event that were current among the people (even if without justification), Judaism…

Sorry for the mistakes—typing on a cellphone without being able to see the whole text on the screen.

Gil,
There is always a way to arrive at such circularity. By the way, this critique of tradition appears in the story of the Wise Man and the Simpleton by Rabbi Nachman, where the wise man demands direct proof and is unwilling to rely on vague rumors. The wise man is the modern scientist who begins from reality here and now and is unwilling to rely on tradition.
Following Rabbi Nachman’s critique, I began to understand the Kuzari not as a proof of faith but as a phenomenology of it. Faith is the tradition passed from father to son about the revelation of God to the people of Israel.
The proof of God’s existence, in my view, does not come from the tradition but from the sense of wonder at reality here and now—or from the very existence of reality, as Rabbi Michi goes on at length to prove in the booklets, or from the existence of the Jewish people in exile, explained only by the nations’ awe of the name of the Lord revealed upon Israel (“For were it not for the fear of Him, how could one nation survive among the nations?” Yoma 69b).

Y.D., a very interesting point. I’d be glad if you’d expand when you can. I seem to remember seeing similar things once in Itamar Eldar’s classes on the Kuzari on the Gush site. Also the philosopher Boaz Gulu in “A Language for the Faithful” suggests a similar direction. This requires study, God willing.

The problem is that if our ancestors were convinced in this way, then maybe that was good for them for some reason. I’m not there.

Gil, the claim that God revealed Himself to the founder of Islam contradicts the claim of revelation to Moses and the prophets of Israel, since they prophesied that a prophet whose prophecy is binding is “from your midst, from your brothers, like me,” but Muhammad (and Islam today as well) insisted that his “prophecy” is binding on Jews and instructed that those who refused to accept him be killed.

I do not understand what bothers people about recognizing the fact that there are false religions—on the contrary: given the human moral condition, it is quite to be expected that there would be such things. In any case, since there are logical contradictions between the religions, it is necessary anyway.

You ask: “Why, if God chose to reveal Himself to prophets throughout the First Temple period, is that not from Heaven?” The Bible offers as evidence for the prophetic authenticity of the prophets of Israel both the claim of public revelation at Sinai (and from the Torah that was given there you learn the method for distinguishing between a true and false prophet from then onward), and also the claim proposed by Isaiah according to which no human source could have known in advance the sorts of things he prophesied. In my opinion, that is a rational claim, and that is how one confirms and refutes every scientific hypothesis according to the philosopher of science Karl Popper, and if it is good enough for scientific hypotheses there is no reason it should not also be good enough for theological ones.

Copenhagen,
I think the basic motivation for claiming that the other religions are not necessarily false is that if they are false, then religious traditions can turn out to be void, and that threatens the Jewish tradition too. The claim that if a tradition is passed down there is no reason to assume a father lies to his son—in other words, that it is not reasonable that lies can be implanted as historical truths—serves for many people as a basis also for the Jewish claim. In Rabbi Kook’s Perplexities of the Generation you see this very clearly (there he raises the possibility that the revelations to Islam and Christianity and their miracles did in fact occur).
As for your actual points, it’s not so simple. First, Balaam was a prophet from among the nations. The Holy One, blessed be He, spoke with Pharaoh and Abimelech about the women they had taken from Isaac and Abraham.
Second, with the verse “from your brothers” one can manage in countless ways, and certainly more flexibly than with quite a few midrashim and rabbinic interpretations of other verses. For example: that a prophet who addresses the people of Israel is “from among your brothers,” but that does not mean there will not also be a prophet for the nations from among their own brothers. In general, for this reason I am very skeptical of proofs from verses. With verses you can always manage.
Third, if you check the fulfillment of prophecies empirically (Popper’s criterion), I think you will not get very far. Most are pretty vague (in the style of the Delphic oracle) and therefore not really falsifiable. Some were not really fulfilled (unless you take a very creative route in interpreting them, and then again we are back to the oracle). And even if there is a prophecy that predicts in advance something very unambiguous that did indeed occur, one must examine how many such cases there are and how many did not occur (to see that this is not just an ordinary statistical phenomenon).
And finally, the principle of “Test Me now in this” forbids testing God (that is, the Torah does not present itself for empirical—Popperian—testing). And even with tithes, where one is permitted to test, I have not heard of anyone who carried out an actual test (though I have already heard excuses in advance—such as that nowadays the promise regarding tithes no longer applies, etc.), and I suspect not for nothing (I assume we all understand what the result of that test would be, and therefore do not dare do it).

Gil,
I understand that you mean the claim about the Kuzari.
The usual understanding of the Kuzari is that it proves God’s existence from the testimony of the many. But as Rabbi Nachman notes, a proof needs to begin from the here and now. Something in reality has to tell you there is a God (and it does not matter whether that statement requires an orderly logical proof of the kind the Rabbi presents in the booklets). Tradition, by contrast, tells us about there and then. As a result, it cannot give us proof of the sort requested.
So what, according to the Kuzari, can be drawn from the tradition? I understand that the tradition gives us the revelation itself. The very tradition that is passed on is our way of encountering the King of India, according to the Kuzari’s parable. And the estimate that the letter from the King of India was not distorted over the years is rooted in the general revelation to the whole people.
Let me expand. In Maimonides’ doctrine of negative attributes there is a very, very powerful Torah intuition: you cannot manipulate God. God is not part of natural reality. This point came to me from Stanislaw Lem’s book Solaris (in general, science fiction and fantasy allow one to conduct all sorts of discussions that “regular” literature does not). This Torah intuition carries a moral message. You cannot manipulate God, and therefore the law God gives is a moral law expressing God’s freedom, not an interested law expressing God’s local interests (quite apart from the claim that the commandments serve a higher need). Maimonides generalizes this moral intuition into a philosophical claim. One cannot say of God anything that belongs to natural reality, and therefore one cannot turn Him into a scientific object. God is not a table, not a body, not a being upon which scientific research can be performed, leading us to develop technology that would control Him.
And yet the fact that God is not part of natural reality does not mean that He has no signifiers in this world. There are objects which, though they are not God, signify God in this world. One signifier is Israel and a second signifier is the Torah. In this sense the revelation continues (“a great voice, and it did not cease”), but not at Mount Sinai; rather in the very existence of Israel and the Torah in the world. This has many historical and halakhic implications, but at the moment I can’t elaborate.
According to this, the Kuzari gives us a phenomenology of revelation. The revelation takes place through the existence of the people of Israel who keep the tradition of the Sinai event and pass it from generation to generation. Therefore, tradition precedes religiosity. Without tradition there is no revelation, and religiosity, as the Kuzari writes, is like an invented medicine that does not really heal.

Team,

It is still not clear. If traditions may turn out to be void, then all the more so—let them be voided (in the style of “From the ends of the earth they will come and say: Surely our fathers inherited nothing but lies”). The desire not to overturn a tradition at any cost, even at the cost of truth, seems pathological to me and a kind of idolatry. A normal person fears “perhaps I am mistaken in my beliefs” (“Happy is the person who is always fearful”), not “perhaps I will discover my beliefs are false, so let’s suppress the truth so that cannot happen.” See Duties of the Heart (I think in its introduction), which compares following traditions without reasons to following a blind man.

“But that does not mean there will not be a prophet for the nations from among their own brothers.” Correct—all I claimed is consistent with the possibility of a gentile prophet for gentiles. But there is no reasonable plain meaning according to which there could be a gentile prophet whose prophecy binds the people of Israel (and in practice cancels most of the prophecies of Moses and the other prophets of Israel)—which is precisely Islam’s claim.
In any case, it seems the criterion of confirmation applies only to a prophet for whom there are independent reasons to think he is a prophet (which is why it appears as a criterion of refutation), certainly not to a prophet who sticks on the Creator of the world the name of a local pagan idol (Allah), commands people to pray toward the local pagan shrine (the Kaaba), to murder Jews who cleave to the Torah of Moses, and to beseech a dead man (himself) to turn to Allah on their behalf—the exact opposite of the direction of the prophets of Israel.
As for “with verses you can always manage,” up to what point? In the story in I Kings 13, a prophet comes who tries to make an artificial forced interpretation of the prophecy spoken to the “man of God,” and he agreed to accept his words. And what is God’s response? “Thus says the Lord: Because you have rebelled against the word of the Lord…” etc.
As for the fulfillment of prophecies, in my opinion at least in the Five Books, especially the prophecies of rebuke in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, there are prophecies that are very clear and highly detailed and were fulfilled (and not only there, but these are the ones I have checked in some depth). I have had occasion to look a bit at atheist critiques of supposedly failed prophecies (the major ones among them), and so far I have not seen biblical prophecies for which there is no reasonable plain reading according to which it is not correct to regard them as failures.

Of course, one must not test God. But the Torah itself encourages testing a prophet already in the law of the prophet (Deuteronomy 18), and the motif recurs in the Prophets, for example: “And Micaiah said: If you return at all in peace, the Lord has not spoken by me. And he said: Hear, all you peoples” (I Kings 22), and likewise in the confrontation between Jeremiah and Hananiah son of Azzur: “As for the prophet who prophesies peace—when the word of that prophet comes to pass, then it shall be known that the Lord has truly sent the prophet” (Jeremiah 28).

I agree in principle. In my remarks I only meant to explain why people are motivated to validate the traditions of others. But beyond that, there is also a real justification here. If people do in fact believe their own tradition, then honesty requires them not to dismiss the traditions of others. Either such a mechanism is reliable in your eyes or it is not. Of course there are differences between traditions (for example, whether the original event occurred before many people or not), but I am speaking only about the trust in tradition as such.
As for prophecy, I’ll just note that it is not enough that there be a reasonable explanation that some prophecy was fulfilled. If you are testing it, that has to be the correct explanation and not merely a possible one. Otherwise we are back to the Delphic oracle (vague prophecies are always fulfilled).

Obviously. One should not dismiss others’ traditions when there is no good reason for doubt. But belief in a tradition as such does not compel the conclusion that the theological principles that tradition generates are reliable. The statement above focused on the theological contradictions between religions, which cannot all be true at the same time.

Regarding prophecy—right, one cannot build the principle of confirmation on vague prophecies. But if it turns out that there are clear and detailed prophecies whose most natural interpretation fits the historical reality after the fact, what do we do with “vague” prophecies uttered by that same prophet? My claim is that one cannot use them to undermine the confirmation, unless we can show that there is no reasonable plain reading according to which it is not correct to say those prophecies failed (in the sense that “absence of evidence is not evidence”).

Y.D. (= initials for “religious Jew”?) hello (is there a way to reply under his message?), your words smell to me like something very, very interesting. I try not to let the Sinai event leave my heart day by day, as per the Torah’s original command (the Kuzari even had a Sinai meditation, as R. Chatzkel Levenstein elaborates should properly be done, and as brought in the book Between Philosopher and Prophet: “In his sacred poems, Judah Halevi sometimes testifies to his religious experiences. For example, in the poem ‘They awaken me with Your name’ he writes: ‘And my heart saw You and believed in You / as though it had stood at Sinai / I sought You in my vision and there passed / Your glory through me and descended in my cloud’… One can interpret these lines according to Kuzari 3:5: the poet imagined he was at Mount Sinai and saw there the Glory. But it seems to me better to interpret them according to 4:3: the poet saw the Glory as it was seen at Mount Sinai… There is no doubt that Judah Halevi’s synesthetic theory of prophecy should be seen as an attempt to explain in philosophical terms the poetic-mystical experiences to which he himself attained. One can state the matter simply. According to the Neoplatonic theory, the accomplished philosopher, who knows God by intellectual contemplation, is on a higher level than the visionary who sees Him through the faculty of imagination. According to Judah Halevi’s conception, the visionary (the possessor of the ‘inner eye’) is on a higher level still. At the same time, there are places in the Kuzari where Judah Halevi adopts positions regarding the faculty of imagination close to Neoplatonic theory. Of course, even in such places he differs from the Neoplatonic philosophers in that for him the knowledge of God is not intellectual knowledge. In Kuzari 3:5, for example, Judah Halevi explicitly presents a mimetic conception of the action of the imaginative faculty. He writes there that the pious man commands the imaginative faculty to place before him the most splendid forms it possesses, in order to imitate in them the divine matter. Accordingly, the pious man imagines visions of the Sinai event, the binding of Isaac, the tabernacle of Moses, the Temple service, etc…”

Back to our topic—I do not understand why, according to your explanation, a supernatural revelation outside the Jewish existence that reports the possibility of revelation is indeed necessary. The very fact that there is such a story, with nothing like it in the history of nations, itself constitutes a revelation of a novelty in the theological field—a novelty best explained by the belief that God stands behind these actions. I raise this because of several major difficulties with making the Sinai event central to faith, and the chief one is this: there is a religious problem in basing faith on a factual claim—such that if it did not happen, then we are all mistaken. Better to base faith on things that are stable and testable.
Now I will explain how one can accept the claim of revelation even without such an actual one coming from outside the testable events:

The innovations revealed in the Jewish people are extraordinary:

In the Bible itself there is a religious-moral leap and uniqueness relative to the cultures of the ancient Near East: the Torah speaks of a single moral God whose form is unseen. The Torah introduces social commandments—the gifts for the poor, the Sabbatical year, a day of rest on the Sabbath. From all these examples it is evident that this is a phenomenon beyond the cultural environment. “How can one explain the monumental testimony of the Bible to the pronounced distinctiveness of the people of Israel in the literary sphere—a historiographic and prophetic literature unlike anything in the ancient Near East, not only in quality but in genre itself—and in the religious-spiritual sphere—a unique monotheistic religion destined to leave its mark on world culture? The religious explanation for these two wondrous phenomena is divine revelation” (Uriel Simon, Seek Peace and Pursue It).

The incomprehensible survival of the Jewish people in exile despite their forced exile, dispersion, and persecution unlike any other—“a tiny group that ought to have dissolved into the space of the history of religions and peoples became the most shaping and influential force in the history of those religions and peoples” (the Kuzari, Goodman)—already constituted in the Middle Ages proof of the special divine providence over them. The divinity of the Bible is also expressed in the fact that all these phenomena were written in advance as prophecies in the Torah, and this even before their wondrous return to their land—the only such event in history, a fulfillment of the prophecies of consolation and the vision of ingathering the exiles brought in the Torah and the Prophets. Already the prophet Isaiah (44:6–8), 2,700 years ago, uses this phenomenon to recognize the uniqueness of the Lord and His revelation to His people Israel: “Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of Hosts: I am the first and I am the last, and besides Me there is no God. And who is like Me? Let him proclaim it and declare it and set it in order before Me, since I appointed an ancient people. And the things to come and what will come, let them declare to them… Have I not from of old declared it to you and told it? And you are My witnesses. Is there a God besides Me?!” And what shall we say today… Israel, in their miraculous very existence and in the fulfillment of the prophecies written about them in the Torah, testify to the omnipotence of the God revealed among them. “Why and how did this ‘anomaly’ influence the whole world, the culture of billions of people? Here the perspective of the believing person enters, who sees the cultural leap relative to the environment as an expression of the divine dimension in the Torah.”

The Jewish people brought a real message in the field of justice and morality, and in the monotheistic theological field. This is one God, involved, who demands justice, etc. These innovations, well known and publicized, test both Jewish sociology and history (their survival among the nations, repair of the world, their wisdom, etc.), the unique theology (one abstract yet involved God), and the book that signifies both of these: the Torah, which presents the monotheistic message on the one hand, and foretells Jewish history on the other—both with respect to the past of the patriarchs, which serves as prefiguration, “the deeds of the fathers are a sign for the children,” and in the future prophecies in the rebuke sections. So we have three fields of novelty: the Jewish people, God, and the Torah.
The fourth novelty:
I see the story of the Sinai event as a fourth novelty, and one that is significant even as a story. But an initial premise is needed: the story of direct revelation could not have been implanted in an entire people in the way the book of Deuteronomy tries to do (which was a law book and was not written for a drawer), unless traditions that the Lord had revealed Himself to all of us at the dawn of our nation were indeed current among the people. Note well! The assumption here is that the book was revealed in a later period and writes about an event that was hundreds of years earlier. And I am not proving, like our outreach-brother apologists, from the impossibility of implantation that such an event indeed occurred—because that is too huge a conceptual leap, and according to the witness argument in the style of Hume it is better to abandon it in favor of the hypothesis that somehow someone confused things, or erred, or falsified. That is preferable to leaping to far-reaching metaphysical proofs (God’s existence and His being one who reveals Himself in law and speech). But on the other hand, I do prove from here something that academic scholarship usually does not dare do. I prove that since such a tradition could not have been implanted, it was not invented by the book’s authors; rather it was current among the people that accepted the book, and all the book does is use that fact (while polishing style and editing) in order to instill its laws (I personally think Deuteronomy was written by Moses, etc., but now I am dealing in philosophical claims and lean theology—not to say trimmed-down theology).

What are we to infer from the fact that such a tradition existed among an entire people? That there was a unique Sinai event in which God revealed Himself? Not necessarily; there are all sorts of hypotheses (rather strained) about how and why this tradition became widespread—perhaps from spiritual interpretation of ancient natural events (earth shaking, etc.), or from an unusual revelation in the style of Our Lady of Fatima, or that it was a kind of literary generalization of many unusual collective prophetic experiences with which the Jewish people abounded at the cradle of its existence, in the Exodus, in the wildernesses of Sinai, and at entry into the Land. This prophetic type—which we encounter in the bands of prophets in the book of Samuel, in the seventy elders prophesying around Moses, in the bacchanalia of the calf, and likewise in the Sinai traditions—perhaps teaches of a high and mystical religiosity that was more common than among the other nations. Maybe. In any case, these are hypotheses that cannot be proved, but they form a kind of attempt to explain how collective revelation could have become a story current among the people even without assuming such a revelation also from God’s side.

So far this is fairly heretical. But I want to go one step further, a step of faith: the fact that I have proved that throughout the whole people, or most of it, there was current a tradition of revelation in the national past, should be analyzed in religious and psychological terms. We need to ask what it means that a people holds such a myth. What does this say about it and about its religion?

It testifies to something about the special character of Israelite thought in biblical times. Not only monotheism and smashing idols. Something else fundamental. The dream and fantasy of the ancient Israelites was to reenact “the day of the Lord” in which He would reveal Himself before His creatures and speak with them. A kind of personal relation… Something like this had already happened in the past but we could not bear it—and from this it follows that it will happen again in the future, on the day of the Lord, according to all the prophecies of universality and the like… In the future we will all be able to prophesy, as in Joel’s prophecy: “And I will pour out My spirit on all flesh… even the male and female slaves shall prophesy.” According to this, the Sinai event is some kind of model for an inner burning to meet God and hear His word. Moses too prophesies, “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets,” etc. That is the big picture—but it also has implications for daily Israelite life: the fact that God revealed Himself to each and every individual in the singular taught of His personality, meeting the person without mediation, involved with him and asking things of him. Here the individual was born. This gave potential equality to all members of the people without mediation. Only this made possible the institution of prophecy, which could openly stand against the king. Indeed, in Deuteronomy 18 the prophet draws his power only because of the sealing of the Sinai event and the leaving open of “I will raise up for them a prophet from among you—like you.” The revolution Deuteronomy makes—and again, only from the Sinai event—is the democracy of knowledge: the study of Torah continues by the force of “a great voice, and it did not cease”… “These words the Lord spoke”… “you shall not forget”… and finally: “You shall teach them and observe to do them… when you sit in your house.” See the sequence in chapters 5–6. Studying Torah in awe, trembling, and sweat, as the Sages expounded, is grounded in the plain meaning of the text. And indeed, the literacy revolution in the Second Temple period and the removal of the Torah from the exclusive possession of the priests is based on the fact that once the Lord revealed Himself to all of us at Sinai. There are also more factors of novelty in the field of magic, conditional law, and personal responsibility, and I cannot go on longer. Send me an email and I’d be happy to send you fascinating material on the subject. ([email protected])/

This is the fourth novelty—not only the uniqueness of Israelite history (A), and not only the theological innovation of one God (B), and all this being documented in a book (C), but also the principles of the democracy of prophecy and knowledge, as well as the utopia of unmediated encounter with the transcendent (D). Therefore Deuteronomy itself seeks to prove that there is no such event in the history of nations—because even as a story, with all its implications, it has no equal. What I want to claim here is that more than it says something about the event, it says something about the believers in the event. And that is a great thing. (On further thought, it may be that the fourth novelty is a branch of the monotheistic novelty: it is not only a unique and exalted God, but He Himself dwells with the crushed and humble of spirit. A kind of two extremes made possible precisely by removing God from nature. His absolute freedom and exaltedness make it possible for Him to “develop personality” that is interested in encounter and not subject to nature, and therefore magic has no effect on Him. This would explain the context in Deuteronomy 18 between the prohibition of magic and the Sinai event that preceded it and by whose force we were commanded, “You shall be wholehearted with the Lord your God… I will raise up a prophet for you, as you requested on the day of the assembly.”)

This is a metaphorical conception of the unique event at Sinai, and only one example out of many that could be imagined. A conception that accepts the theological and practical conclusions that such an event would certainly have caused had it occurred, and this even without accepting its factual occurrence on the ground itself. It accepts the heteronomous (external) validity of the commandments without accepting the concrete event that validates them, since the Creator of the world is the cause of everything, and if He wishes to bring a people to acceptance of belief in a Torah from Heaven, He can do so through public revelation just as He can do it through a historical unfolding within nature—what matters in the end is the result, not the route by which it was carried out. In the result, the Jewish people believed exactly all those things that an actual revelation would have caused them to believe. So why is it necessary? From the Creator’s point of view, the main thing is the result: just as He could have created a complex world in six days but chose to do it in billions of years, so too He could have given the Torah in one day but chose (perhaps) to give it in a thousand years. Just as the final result of the complex creation is what matters (say: a thinking and intelligent human being as the peak of creation), so too with regard to the Torah and the set of revolutionary beliefs it brought in its wings to the whole world, etc.

According to this, I agree with you that the people of Israel and the Torah signify the Creator, and in my opinion they are also testimony to His revelation—not one external revelation but an ongoing and internal revelation. God is revealed from them and in them (much more than in the other religions, which lack these special characteristics and also do not aim their message outward as Judaism does—but that is another topic).

Rabbi Kook wrote exactly these things about the “negative” meaning of belief in Torah from Heaven:
In Perplexities of the Generation (chapter 56): “The main point in the foundation of Torah from Heaven is only the removal of the negation, namely, not to say that Moses said it of his own accord without divine influence. And this is certainly intelligible to anyone who sees the effect of the Torah on Israel and on the whole world. In general, it is impossible for any great general action, fixed for generations, not to be influenced by divine influence. True, the values of the influences in their clarity and purity depend on one’s assessment of the value of the Torah, but this is not at all a matter of the foundation of belief in Torah from Heaven.”

Meaning, being satisfied with the approach that the Torah was written “under divine influence,” without trying to sharpen further the resolution of our knowledge about this—already brings the one who adopts it within the gates of belief in Torah from Heaven. Rabbi Kook repeats and emphasizes this point:
“We need to show the obligation of keeping the Torah and its holiness even if one accepts all the claims of error of the critics of Holy Scripture. Even so, this Israelite nation, which did so much to make known the name of the blessed God in the world through its existence, and still stands in its existence, deserves that with feelings of holiness we sanctify all that issues from its spirit, and whatever is more infused with its spirit and attached to the life of its soul deserves that each of its members sanctify and fulfill it. And this is certainly a supreme will and a supreme and successful moral guidance.”
And elsewhere:
“When the hand of a critic comes to criticize Holy Scripture, and even if only with an airy conjecture, according to the current state of criticism in this, his spirit goes out to say that the writing of the Torah was delayed, according to the extremism of the stubborn critics, then all their foundations are void. Not so the house of Israel, ‘borne from the womb, carried from the belly.’ We feel the Torah in our lives in their fullness, in our existence, in our desire, in our feeling, and in our historical sense. Even if all the words of the Torah among us were only an oral tradition, once it has become so united and fitted with the whole condition of our lives, we know in this the hand of the Lord and His covenant.”

It is not the ancient event of the giving of the Torah as such that obligates us to keep Torah and commandments, but the way we understand it as a trans-historical divine revelation and as a covenant applying to the people of Israel throughout its generations. The message and the meaning are the main thing; it would therefore seem possible to forgo the historical occurrence itself and remain only with them. (It is important to see Rabbi Kook in the original; of course he strongly disputes these views, which he accepts only post factum for heretics, but that would take us too far afield.)

This proposal admittedly does not rely on proofs of revelation but on a prior belief that the people of Israel are the very locus of revelation, and that indeed the Lord stands behind the life and Torah of the Jewish people. But as far as I am concerned, I do not see how a faith of this kind differs from the faith of believers in the Sinai event as a condition for keeping the commandments. They are not willing to keep commandments without believing there was a Sinai event, and then they believe and keep them and everything is settled. Since all the proofs of the truth of Torah from Heaven (and there are some very good ones) can also stand if we assume the development of the Jewish people was natural, I do not see from where one should make the leap to a wondrous event.

P.S. All this was written for the sake of magnifying Torah and glorifying it, and of course the plain meaning of the scriptural testimony stresses the reliability of the Sinai event, etc., and of course if such an event did occur, the best way to preserve it is exactly the way the Torah does, including all the remembrance of the Exodus, and words of truth are recognizable. But all I discussed is that even skepticism over whether such a factual event occurred (and we can never know with certainty that it did) does not harm the truth of the Torah and Judaism. What is needed here is faith that God stands behind the events, but that faith is no different from the decision to believe that He indeed revealed Himself as written.

With God’s help, 5 Elul 5778

To Gil—Gil the witness!

What is the problem with saying things plainly?

It seems that the Creator who revealed Himself to Adam and Eve, commanded them commandments and reproved them when they strayed from the path, the Creator who revealed Himself to Cain and Abel and expressed His different attitude to their offerings and instructed Cain how to improve his way—it seems that the Creator is interested in maintaining an unmediated and constant connection with His creatures.

But the fact that His response achieved the opposite goal—that the human being whom He instructed and reproved refused to accept His rebuke—led the Creator to the conclusion that at this stage it was better to “take hold of the mode of silence” and let man arrive at his own pace at a state in which he would truly want to renew the unmediated bond with his God.

And ever since, the Creator peeks every few generations through the cracks to see whether a fissure has opened in humanity’s opacity, some opening of thirst for “what proceeds from the mouth of the Lord.” There was a brief period of renewed connection in the days of Noah, and then the connection again fell silent. More stable was the bond created with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from whom arose a suffering nation in which there was still preserved a faint echo of the hope, “God will surely remember you.”

In the furnace of subjugation and suffering, and in the memory of the prophetic past of the patriarchs, a nation arose that was ripe for renewed revelation by its God. A revelation before the eyes of the whole people, in which they all heard the voice of God speaking to them from the midst of the fire, and the continuation of the revelation to Moses during the forty years of wandering—a revelation that left in our hands a written Torah and tradition, constituting a firm foundation for our grappling with every new question, in wisdom and prophecy that stand firm upon the foundation of the Torah of Moses.

At Sinai the Ten Commandments were given to us, all of them a repair of Cain’s defect, which led to the removal of the gift of prophecy, becoming lovely in his own eyes through his arrogance and unwillingness to accept the guidance of his Creator and through his jealousy of his brother. One whose spiritual world begins with the recognition that the Lord his God is the One who made him free, one who does not see his success through his own labor as the whole picture, but rests every seventh day in order to internalize that he is not “the boss,” and one who is willing to live by “You shall not covet” and “You shall not desire”—he is the one fit to receive anew the gift of divine revelation!

With blessing,
S.Z. Levinger

In the last paragraph, line 1:
… all of them a repair of Cain’s defect, which brought upon humanity the loss of the gift of prophecy, a defect stemming from his arrogance…

Gil,
Beautiful and enlightening words.

Two small comments:
1. Hume’s argument against belief in miracles is plainly infantile, and you should not take it into account. Maybe I’ll devote a few words to it when I get the chance.
2. It seems to me that you build the main argument on a moral conception (mistaken in my opinion) called consequentialism: that it is permitted (for providence) to perform an act that is bad in itself (to lie to an entire people) in order that good may grow from it.

Gil, bottom line, I do not understand why in your opinion a unique phenomenon of belief in some belief (empty belief) indicates anything. If a group were to arise today that decided there are flying aliens with pink wings—a belief unlike anything else in humanity—would I have to assume that those aliens probably exist and are the ones who implanted that belief in the members of the group? It seems to me a strange argument. Similar to the spiritual charisma that Amit Kula talks about in his book, which I criticized precisely on this point.

It is known that in that period Atenism brought the message of one god who cancels the existence of the other gods, and he too is all-powerful and beyond time—that means there was worship of one god in that period.
How unusual is our revelation story when the Egyptians were already worshipping one god?

Rabbi Michi, I do not think it should be compared to the story about aliens. A. We have no basis whatsoever for belief in pink aliens, but in a God involved with human history we actually do have such a basis (as you showed in the booklets). B. Even if it is similar, I do not think one should say that God implanted in the heads of the Jews at the end of the First Temple period the belief in collective revelation in its plain sense. I do think that if this phenomenon is so unique and carries such an immense moral and theological message (for elaboration see Berman’s excellent articles: http://tchelet.org.il/article.php?id=458&page=all
http://tchelet.org.il/article.php?id=337)

then there is some basis for the conjecture—for one who wants to believe the chain of Jewish transmission—that the one standing behind these actions is God. This is faith, not proof. In exactly the same way, and perhaps less so, belief in a unique event in which God revealed Himself plainly—this too is faith, not proof. But in that there are several difficulties for faith, chiefly this: grounding faith on a fact—not certain to have occurred—and if it did not occur, the whole faith collapses. What I am proposing rests on a proven and existing reality—the uniqueness of the Jewish people—and that cannot be challenged on the basis of doubt (one can dispute the data, but regarding Sinai there is not even any data).

C. This is the important point—when I find so many exceptional points in the Jewish people, that stimulates and challenges me to ask whether this is divine intention or not. I would certainly ask that if I had lived at the end of the First Temple period, and certainly after its destruction. And precisely for that reason the greatest prophets, chief among them Isaiah (40–66), keep returning and arguing that prophecies of the future are unique to the God of Israel, and that His eternal covenant with Israel is the guarantee that He is the One standing behind the events accompanying the people. Had I lived then I might have remained doubtful—but today, from the distance of thousands of years of history, I stand in the position of the scientist after carrying out several experiments to prove his claim. (Even today I am not in a position of certainty, but I allow myself to see the revelation of God gazing out through history—which is the heart of the Jewish innovation as against the pagan nature religions. Once I choose to do so, I find many hints to the truth of this thesis.)

In summary—I am not arguing Rabbi Kula’s point about charismatic people who wrote the Torah; I am arguing that the Torah is a divine document and that the people who produced this document are a people under His special providence—and it is all the same to me how it was written and when.

Shavi—regarding the question of falsehood, I do not think the claim that the Sinai event occurred before masses is a noble lie, because that is so only if it was written and given to people of that very generation. According to the academic assumption (which for the sake of discussion only—I accept it and argue that even by its lights there is no refutation of Torah from Heaven), the book was published hundreds of years after the event, and therefore it is not lying. What I argued is that it would not have been public knowledge that the entire generation of the Exodus experienced revelation unless this tradition had indeed been current among the people. And as such it is true, as a story it was indeed correct. God revealed Himself. And more than that: since I can easily translate the meaning of this story into theological terms, this is like one more of the Torah’s metaphors—and Heaven forbid, Heaven forbid, it is not a lie. What is the meaning of God revealing Himself to masses? I wrote above at length, and to shorten: democratic and individualistic meaning on the one hand, bound up with responsibility for the whole nation on the other (Samson Raphael Hirsch expands on this in Exodus 19), as well as the fact that the exalted God is interested in each and every individual and demands morality (Heschel expanded on this), etc. etc.

S.Z.L.—of course your position is simpler and more prevalent, but I came to argue that belief in Torah from Heaven is not obligated to rest on a factual claim that is always in doubt as to whether it really happened or not. Add to that the mythological difficulties of a God who reveals Himself and speaks Hebrew, and why He did so only once and then stopped, etc. etc.

Itai—the god Aten is a sun-god, and in that he is still subordinate to nature. In this the Lord is utterly different, and the main Jewish monotheistic innovation is not numerical—that God is one—but rather God’s transcendence, that He is not subject to nature or magic at all, and together with that He is interested in each and every individual, a loving and compassionate God. In the god Aten, may his name and memory be blotted out, there is nothing of that—neither exaltedness nor descent to the people. The god Aten also did not create Torah and law and had no impact on the world beyond a few years of kingship on some negligible desert mound in Egypt that we would know absolutely nothing about without archaeology. The Torah of Israel and the message of monotheism influenced the whole world exactly as is written in it itself: “And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”… “And wherein shall it be known that I have found favor in Your sight, I and Your people? Is it not in Your going with us, so that we are distinguished, I and Your people, from all the people that are upon the face of the earth?”… “For this is your wisdom and your understanding in the eyes of the nations, who shall hear all these statutes and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”

. Besides that, there is a likelihood that belief in him was influenced by the events of the Exodus or by the faith of the patriarchs who came to Egypt and ruled there. See on this Yehuda Elitzur and more and more.

Fine, here I disagree. Without an actual revelation I have no trust in this matter.

Gil,
Someone who knows how to describe the distant future in detail can only be either a God who rules history or someone who receives information from Him. If a righteous messenger comes, with intellect and moral qualities, and not a flatterer, and successfully describes such a future to us in His name, it would be strange to think that while he can indeed describe the future without error, he cannot describe the past without error. In light of the prophecies that were fulfilled, the exalted morality, the unity of message among prophets in different generations (and much more), the a priori probability I assign to the idea that the Bible contains facts about the past that did not occur is extremely low, certainly regarding foundational events like the Sinai event.

You say: “According to the academic assumption the book was published hundreds of years after the event and therefore it is not lying.” By the word “academic research,” do you mean Kitchen, who proves that it could not be that the writer did not know ancient Egypt from personal experience, the Egypt about which he speaks? Or Archer, who argued already some 70 years ago that if the source of the Pentateuch were from the period of Isaiah or after, expressions like ‘the Lord of Hosts’ would have had to appear hundreds of times throughout the Pentateuch? (Yet, absurdly enough, it does not appear even once.) And if you should say the writer omitted it intentionally—I am not inclined to believe such absurd conspiracy theories. In any case, in my opinion it is clear that if at least the main events of the Exodus and the wanderings in the wilderness in the Pentateuch were not written close to their own time, then it is a lie and an act of fraud, all the more so if the facts themselves never occurred.

It is not clear to me what is so “mythological” about a God who chooses to reveal His word through His prophets. That same “God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and takes no bribe” seems to me the complete opposite of all pagan mythologies. Nor is it clear to me what exactly is more mythological about a revealing God than a wave that becomes a particle at exactly the moment we decide to place some measuring device (whose distinction from objects that are not “measuring devices” may derive entirely from human needs) at the other end of the universe, 15 billion light years away.

In my opinion one cannot uproot Scripture from its plain meaning whenever we prefer not to be bound by a certain fact. If the Creator revealed Himself, that means He wants us to shape our understanding according to His word and not shape His word according to our understanding (otherwise revelation has no usefulness or meaning at all).

Copenhagen—thanks. Your remarks about the particle are interesting and require thought. I’ll respond briefly on the points of disagreement: A. In my view the Torah does not behave as perhaps we would expect an objective divine document to behave. But it is divine (that is my assumption), and from this it follows that our expectation of the divine document is mistaken. It may be, for example, that for God it is more important to meet human beings at their level (He came down and took) and only shape their traditions about creation and the flood—and not formulate for them the pure truth. And if so, it may be that the flood is like the giving of the Torah—both are shaped traditions whose significance lies more in their message than in the facticity of their existence. Therefore in my eyes this is not a lie at all. I already wrote that there is a historical core to these traditions, and the Torah adds layers and writes in the style of the aggadic literature with respect to Torah stories: that is to say—as the Sages do to the Torah stories, and it is not a lie (the patriarchs kept the whole Torah—that is not a lie because the meaning is that we should follow in their ways, unlike the Christians, may their name be blotted out, who attached to the patriarchs faith alone, as is known to those familiar and accustomed to the “Gospel of Iniquity”), so the Torah does to traditions that circulated among the people, and that is not a lie (because the main thing is the meaning—God indeed reveals Himself and demands of each and every individual the keeping of the commandments). More than that—the Sages said that every day a heavenly voice goes forth from Horeb, and that is true (at the deeper level), and the Torah could write the same. .B. You wrote that God chooses to reveal His word through His prophets, and as is known they each write in a different style according to the prism of their personality

Continuation was cut off—(how do you write long replies from a cellphone?)—and that is natural because according to this God is like abstract radio waves, each person receiving as a speech, and this is classic in mysticism. But at Sinai the story is different because all the masses heard God without preparation, and they also heard exactly the same thing, which means there is here an unfamiliar phenomenon arising from an awakening from above and not based at all on what is familiar to us and known from the structure of the human soul. If so, this was a purely active operation of God to make the whole people prophesy together and tell them things they were not expecting, standing beyond the horizon of their spiritual preparation (which differs from one individual to another). In this sense there is here a phenomenon unlike any other, and there is in it a certain mythological tinge, as Maimonides famously felt, and therefore neutralized it altogether. But there is another point here. Not only are the prophets a phenomenon for whose core there is at least some parallel in mystical reality and therefore easier to accept, but they also left a real mark—in the form of their sublime books. Whereas the giving of the Torah left no mark, and its effect on the people could also have been achieved by a single prophet (Moses) in exactly the same way. Since it is easy to explain the meaning of the giving of the Torah in a symbolic sense (the people of Israel are prophets in that they are the expression of revelation), your insistence on its historical certainty seems like wishful thinking.

Continuation—unless you agree that it is reasonable that the giving of the Torah happened, but even if not you do not reject Torah from Heaven (for if it is possible that God did not reveal Himself and still gave Torah to His people through nature—as is found in all the religions of the world—then your decision to force upon Him such an anthropomorphic revelation could be considered the sin of corporealization, no different from the physicalists because of the verses). If you would say that, it seems more reasonable. That way you could also remain a believing person who decides (like Leibowitz) to serve God, and not remain forever hanging on the doubt that maybe the foundational event did not happen and then everything is one huge mistake. Such faith certainly does not allow self-sacrifice for the Torah and death for the sanctification of the Name, as the mechanism I propose does (proof: Buddhist martyrs gave their lives even בלי believing in public revelation—but that would take us too far afield). It is impossible to hang faith on the basis of a factual event when there is no way to know if it happened. The ancients were convinced it happened 100% because the received tradition is like seeing with one’s own eyes. We are not there today, and I suggest that you be convinced, though not with certainty, by that same tradition of the nation, which is itself the signifier of revelation (as Y.D. wrote, in times when revelation still existed).

A. The Torah never hints anything in the style of: “I have come to shape your traditions,” but insists that certain facts occurred in history, and it describes some of them at length and in great detail. When someone speaks to me that way, it is clear that his intention is factual description and not “shaping my traditions” (which seems to me paternalistic and condescending). You see that the Torah and the Prophets do not shrink from total opposition to everything corrupt in man and in pagan society, including within Israel itself, in the spirit of “let the law pierce the mountain,” without compromise.

There is no historical reason to think a flood did not happen in one way or another (and there are reasons to think it did). By contrast, in the creation story the question is mainly intra-textual: is the purpose of the words a physical description of the chain of events, or a theological description? But regarding the stories of the Exodus and the Sinai event, it is clear that the intention of the words is to narrate the events, and more than that, the realistic scent that rises from the text leaves no room for doubt. For example, “And the flax and the barley were struck down, for the barley was in the ear and the flax was in bud. But the wheat and the spelt were not struck down, for they ripen late” (Exodus 9:31–32). The crop cycle describes exactly Egyptian reality, but has no practical relevance in Canaan.

When the Sages expound verses, it is clear to them and to their hearers that this is homiletic interpretation and not factual description. Otherwise they would be lying or mistaken. “Justification by Faith” is an invention of Luther the antisemite, who in order to sustain it wanted to remove the Epistle of James from the Christian canon (of course his colleagues explained to him that that was impossible).

B. The fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, speaks to the prophet through his personality does not contradict the fact that the speech is produced under His inspiration. If the Holy One, blessed be He, wants to speak in a way that will be understood by human beings, He must speak through human language and concepts grasped by the human mind. What is surprising is that the message arising from all the prophets, who lived in different times and cultures, is coherent.

I’ll respond to a few points.

“Which means there is here an unfamiliar phenomenon arising from an awakening from above.” Absolutely. If not, I might have thought we were dealing with those pagan mystics who swarmed among all the nations of the world, or with the false prophets in Israel—“prophets of the deceit of their own heart,” as Jeremiah calls them—and not with a real revelation from the Creator of the world.

“In this sense there is here a phenomenon unlike any other”—correct. “And there is in it a certain mythological tinge”—why? On the contrary.

“Maimonides felt this, and therefore neutralized it altogether”—Maimonides’ reason is that there is a serious rationale to understand the plain meaning that way (and like the opinion in the Talmud), and it fits his cosmological proof, since there is no need for God to reveal Himself by audible words if the matters can be proved by the force of the miracle, for then the thing makes an impression on a person throughout his life, while at the same time Moses’ mission is confirmed.

“Whereas the giving of the Torah left no mark.” How do you know?

“Since it is easy to explain the meaning of the giving of the Torah symbolically… your insistence on its historical certainty seems like wishful thinking.” The description of the event is far too concrete, and if we uproot it from its plain meaning we can, by a similar interpretive methodology, uproot most of the Pentateuch. In any case, it has nothing to do with wishful thinking, because as I showed, it is strange to think that one who knows how to describe the future reliably would err regarding key events of his own time and of the past (or that the Creator would lie to us).

“As is found in all the religions of the world”—what is found in the religions of the world is in the category of “our fathers inherited nothing but lies, vanity, and things in which there is no benefit,” so there is no reason there should be any special expectation that God would want to imitate them—“what has straw to do with grain?”

As for “anthropomorphizing God,” this is a description of action and not a description of the essence of the Creator Himself, and the medieval authorities already discussed this. If you wish to refute them, you will have to show what is wrong with their reasoning and not merely recycle clichés. I do not remain hanging on the doubt whether the foundational event happened. First of all, the Torah does not hang all its foundations on the event but on the tradition in general, the existence and uniqueness of the people of Israel, and the truth of prophecy; and in any case I have already explained why I do not think there is any serious a priori chance that it did not happen.

Hello, honorable Rabbi.
Regarding the uniqueness of our commandments, which are not connected to morality—we can see such commandments in Islam too. True, they copied them from us, but still in the end there is another people that keeps such commandments—does the uniqueness remain?
Also regarding the conception of God as supernatural, that too exists in Islam and Christianity—true, we began this conception and it was unique in the past, but today we have partners in it, so is our uniqueness reduced?
Thank you very much.

With God’s help, eve of Yom Kippur 5779

To Itai—greetings,

The fact that the people of Israel succeeded in influencing large parts of humanity with their faith and values, and precisely in periods of weakness and exile—testifies a thousandfold to the uniqueness of the people and the uniqueness of its Torah!

The people of Israel are the “firstborn son” who draws his younger brothers after him and “brings them near to Torah,” the “heart among the nations” that ferments all humanity for good and for bad. This is our destiny; we cannot deny it or flee from it, and it is fitting that we bear our destiny with joy!

With blessing,
S.Z. Levinger

Itai, what are you saying? There are questions that require half a minute of thought, and I do not see any point in raising them.