What needs to be in such an event…

What at minimum needs to be in such an event for it to serve as a source of obligation?
And how, in your opinion, could it actually have taken place
in the connection between the transcendent and material reality in the world.

Sorry if I’m being a pain…. but this point in your argument isn’t clear enough beyond the general statement… that there was…

There was what?

Have a peaceful Sabbath

What is supposed to be shared is that there was an interaction between God and a group of people from among our ancestors. That core is what matters, and the rest of the surrounding details don’t really matter. It is only natural that such an event would acquire various “decorations.”
The question of how the connection was created was already asked by the Rashba (if I remember correctly, in responsa, vol. 4, no. 234), but I have never understood what the problem is. Why can’t the Holy One, blessed be He, reveal Himself and speak to people? Who or what prevents Him from doing so? Those who raise this difficulty argue that if the recipients do not meet the conditions for prophecy, they cannot experience revelation. I don’t see any difficulty in that. It is the Holy One’s decision to whom He chooses to reveal Himself.

You’re still dodging how such an event is possible
(not because of limitations on God) but because of the limitation of man….
How did our ancestors know that it was the Lord revealing Himself to them…

Rabbi Y., what exactly am I dodging? I said I don’t see a question, and you haven’t explained it to me. Please explain the question and I’ll try to answer.
If the Holy One, blessed be He, can create a world, and human beings, and make all sorts of things happen in it, why can’t He speak to someone He wants to speak to? Kill me, but I have never understood this strange question. You keep asking it again and again, but you don’t explain to me what the question is. Help me: what am I supposed to answer?
Can’t the Holy One, blessed be He, move air and create sound waves just as you and I can? Can’t He create an image for us to see? Can’t He create within us an experience of meeting Him? I can think of countless ways of revealing Himself very easily. As I told you, in my view this question does come up among the commentators (like the Rashba), but there it comes from a different angle: they assume that in order to encounter the Holy One, a person must reach the level of prophecy, and so they wonder how the Holy One reveals Himself to an entire people. That is a completely different question, and let’s just say I’ve seen better questions than that one too. By the way, that is also what the Rashba answers there.

Your question of how they knew that the Holy One was revealing Himself to them seems to me similar to the question of how you know there is a chair in front of you. Think of a blind person who asks you how you know that. You would answer that you see it. And he (who is unfamiliar with that experience) will ask you how you know your eyes are not deceiving you. He can bring up the phenomenon of a fata morgana. What would you answer him? Nothing. So should he therefore not believe you?
A similar question is asked by Soren Kierkegaard about our forefather Abraham at the binding of Isaac: how did he know that it really was the Holy One, especially since in his case it contradicted everything he knew (principles of morality, the promise that through Isaac his offspring would be called, etc.). And the answer to that is that when a person encounters the Holy One, he apparently knows and understands that he has encountered Him, even if for us, who have not undergone this (= blind to such phenomena), it is hard to understand, and also hard to explain to us.
Likewise with any scientist who sees a new phenomenon: you can always ask whether perhaps there was some mistake, and how he knows he really saw it that way, and so on. If there are a number of people reporting that they saw something, I tend to accept it unless proven otherwise. Especially when other aspects are added that reinforce it.

The question is Kierkegaard’s question.
Is his answer serious or satisfactory…? On what basis does he claim it…?

The people’s report doesn’t convince me…. when the official report is riddled with contradictions….

Well, to that I have no answer, and there can be no answer: how does any person know what he says he knows? Especially when the questioner has no tools to sense what the other person sensed, so it is no wonder he is skeptical (like the blind person).

As I said, the contradictions are not in the report, but in the “colors” added to it afterward.

Especially since according to your own view, they in any case could not hear or see in the ordinary sense, so what is surprising about one source choosing the metaphor of sight and another that of hearing? According to the difficulty you raise, these are metaphors anyway. In fact, Scripture itself senses this and writes that they were “seeing the sounds.” If so, there is no contradiction here, and one can also treat this as reports from the actual participants themselves (and not necessarily later “coloring”).

You have to define, or more accurately conceptualize, what it means that a person experiences that the Lord is speaking to him.
Is this a subjective feeling (for which, presumably, today anyone claiming such a thing would be hospitalized)?
Not only that—this is not an “ordinary” phenomenon, where even a blind person can get from others something that might be reasonable (in your language, synthetic a priori), but a one-time, unique experience—how can one understand that it really is the Lord?

A note: “and all the people saw the sounds” — I don’t think you need to say they saw sound waves (or that the ear was amplified into the visual faculty), absolutely not.

Of course this brings us back to the essence of prophecy.
What is prophecy?
We don’t really know.
But we do see that the Rabbi in the Guide made an effort to explain what it is… because otherwise how did they “understand” the first two commandments?

It is no accident that Maimonides spoke about the presence of prophecy in the “air,” and that a person who has reached the right level is able to draw it in…
But Maimonides is not the topic,
rather the level of certainty by which, in a one-time event, a huge public understands that the Lord is speaking to it.
Maybe the pyrotechnics were meant to answer this question.

I also don’t think one needs to talk about connecting the eyes to the hearing center or vice versa. What I suggested here is something else entirely. Since in any case these are metaphors, because there was no ordinary seeing or hearing there, then there is no contradiction at all between using the metaphor of sight and the metaphor of hearing. To each his own metaphor.

“Seeing the sounds”… that was just a side note.

The issue itself is: what does it mean, or what is the experience, that the Lord speaks to a person (especially according to your view that the Torah understands that He has no body and no bodily form)?
What is the meaning of a one-time experience in history, when many people have experienced other things?

So what is this experience by which a person can say: I heard the voice of the Lord, and it was the voice of the Lord to the people of Israel?

I, for one, would think I had gone crazy….

And about that I wrote to you that the blind person too would think the sighted person had gone crazy. And the skeptic also thinks that someone who is not skeptical is crazy (because what proof do you have that what you see really exists?). The fact is that a person reaches conclusions concerning the reliability of his knowledge and perceptions. Someone from the outside who has not experienced it cannot understand. Especially when many people experienced it, the obvious conclusion is not that they all went crazy, but that there really was something there that we have not experienced. A person heard (at least metaphorically) in a clear way that the Holy One revealed Himself to him. What is the problem? It is true that I have never experienced this. So what? They all did experience it.

A primary, one-time experience is not likely to be experienced by everyone in a uniform way.
The difference with a blind person is that even if he does not see, he can theoretically understand what is going on, and in any case the knowledge of his surroundings is knowledge acquired and understood by generations, not something one-time.

A one-time, unfamiliar phenomenon… it is hard to attribute it to someone or something, and for everyone to think similarly….
I’m not convinced….

Apparently I’m blind to your point…?

Right, so we’ve just seen that in fact it wasn’t uniform (and regarding prophecy too, the Sages say that no two prophets prophesy in the same style. It is revealed differently to each one). You yourself explain why.
After the generations processed and understood these collective experiences, the tradition of the revelation at Mount Sinai was formed. But they were honest enough to transmit all the reports and not organize them into one uniform account. Like Schwartz’s claim about the weaving together of the different sources into the biblical text, which was done out of commitment to each of them.

There is a huge difference between a blind person who is among sighted people who know the experience and he only needs to trust them,
and
a group of blind people with not a single sighted person next to them—how can they trust when they have no tool for comparison?

Hope I explained myself….

I think you’ve taken the analogy somewhere else.
In our analogy, the people at Sinai are the sighted ones, and I/you are the blind ones. The question is whether we trust them or not.

How were their eyes opened so that they understood the meaning of something they had never experienced before?

Like a baby who constantly experiences things it has never experienced before. That’s how one learns.

If a baby saw a one-time experience and afterward was cut off from that experience… would he learn?

We’re getting into corners here, but it seems both of us are enjoying it,
and the difference in each of our outlooks is also clear,
but let’s keep going, it’s nice, and maybe we’ll get to the “truth.”

Yes, he would learn. Of course many repetitions help more, but it is built from a little learning each time.