Let’s take for example the verse that opens the story of the revelation at Mount Sinai: “And Moses went up to God, and the Lord called to him from the mountain, saying.”
This verse is basically a linguistic deception; it uses metaphors whose meaning I do not understand. Like in the example I gave, where the sighted person said to the blind person, “I heard a beautiful song,” when what the sighted person really meant was, “I saw a beautiful picture.” In other words, we read a verse that is supposed to describe to us what happened there, but in practice it has not really described anything to us.

I’ll try to explain by means of a dialogue between me and Moses our rabbi:
Moses: God called to me and said to me…
Me: What do you mean, called to you? Did you hear His voice calling your name?
Moses: No.
Me: Then what do you mean by “called to you”?
Moses: You can’t understand; you’ve never experienced it.
Me: Okay, so basically you haven’t told me anything. Other than that you had some kind of experience, I understand nothing from your words. But let me ask: how did you identify that it was God in that experience?
Moses: You can’t understand.

And so on…

Even if the blind person believes the sighted person that he saw the color green, it is still meaningless for the blind person.
So when Moses tells me, “God said to me,” that is meaningless for me.

That’s just casuistry. A message passed from the Holy One, blessed be He, to Moses. You don’t have the experience, but that sentence is completely clear. Exactly like it is clear to a blind person when you tell him, “Watch out, there’s a pit here,” even though he has never seen a pit.

“Watch out, there’s a pit here” is a sentence that speaks about a fact. But the commandments are a norm that is created by the very saying/command of God. If the saying is not really a saying, then the norm is not created.

Or as you formulated it in your book: “When we stand before God commanding us, it is self-evident to us that there is an obligation to obey His voice.” In other words, the very experience/encounter with the divine command creates the obligation. But if I am incapable of understanding that experience, how can the obligation be created for me?

I don’t see a problem here.
If I have reached the conclusion that God revealed Himself and commanded, then as far as I’m concerned one must obey. There is no need at all for the experience of revelation itself.

I’ll try asking from another angle.
How do I know that Moses’ identification—that it really was God commanding him—is correct? Maybe it was Moses’ mistaken interpretation?
I’m asking on the assumption that I believe Moses that this is what he experienced, but how do I know whether that experience is genuine?

Seemingly the whole people experienced the fact that the Lord was revealing Himself here, and Moses only completed the details. “So that the people may hear when I speak with you, and also believe in you forever,” “And the Lord came down on Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain, and the Lord called Moses to the top of the mountain,” “I am” and “You shall have no other gods” we heard directly from the mouth of Divine Power.

T, that doesn’t matter to the question itself—who experienced the revelation.

[Indeed, I was mistaken; I thought you were asking about the people there in relation to Moses, and not about us.]

I feel like I’m not quite managing to explain myself, so I’ll try from yet another direction.
The words “God revealed Himself and commanded” can have all sorts of meanings. For example, I could tell you that I went off by myself on some mountain for 40 days and spent all those days immersed in deep philosophical thoughts, and I reached the conclusion that there is a God and that it is not proper to murder. And if I use a metaphor I could tell you: God revealed Himself to me and commanded me not to murder. And that is a true sentence, but it has a different meaning from what we usually think of when we say “God revealed Himself and commanded.”
Therefore, I claim that it is important to understand what was in the experience of revelation. And as long as I do not understand, I cannot accept religious obligation.

Daniel, why are you forcing yourself to interpret revelation as something unintelligible? Is hearing the voice of God unintelligible to you? Start from the assumption that it is the same sensory hearing as we know today—why get yourself tangled up?

What’s the story with you, Daniel? Why are you being so stubborn?

Why are you complicating simple things?

From your point of view, God said something to someone just like a person said something to someone. Only God is a bit more than a human being. And part of that “bit more” has no meaning from your point of view. But the fact that we’re talking about a being with intelligence who created the world does tell you something (and therefore His intelligence is probably very great), and also that He has great powers (apparently omnipotent). And that intelligence and power are what give His command its authority. Omniscience (within the bounds of logical possibility—which also includes Rabbi Michi’s approach) and omnipotence are the meaning of God for you (as transcending a human being, that is, a being with intelligence), and they are what obligate you to obey His command.

He tells you that he is convinced, and you have to decide whether you believe him or not (there was surrounding evidence, like the pyrotechnics, etc. Some of it the whole people heard, and so on). Just as the blind person has to decide whether he believes the sighted person, or the layman has to decide whether he believes the physicist or the doctor.

Rabbi Michael,
Even when a person suffering from hallucinations tells me he is convinced that he sees a tiger in the room, I believe him. The question is what that means from my point of view.
I will use my critical and investigative abilities to understand whether the problem is with him—that he is hallucinating—or the problem is with me—that I don’t see well.
In addition, one must distinguish between the facts the person experienced and his interpretation. Even if I believe the person regarding the fact, I do not necessarily accept his interpretation. As I wrote before, a person can get up in the morning with the insight that he should put on tefillin, and tell me that the Holy One, blessed be He, sent him a message that one should put on tefillin (after all, who caused him to arrive at that insight if not the Holy One, blessed be He?).
My problem with Moses and the people who were at Mount Sinai is this: although I believe them that they are telling the truth, I have no way to examine and check whether this experience reflects the truth, and I have no way to understand from their words what is fact and what is their interpretation—because I do not understand this experience.

You’re mixing apples and oranges. At first you asked how one can accept an experience that one does not know. I answered. Now you raise the possibility that maybe he is hallucinating. The possibility that he is hallucinating exists even when it is an experience I do know. That is just a skeptical question and has nothing to do with the question whether this is an experience familiar to me or not. I have already written more than once that I have nothing to say about skeptical questions.
In short, we’ve exhausted this.

Allow me one further question.
If the most reliable person you know comes to you, and he is completely mentally healthy, and he tells you, “God revealed Himself to me and told me that you need to cut off a finger”—he tells you that he experienced this with full certainty. From your acquaintance with him it is clear to you that he is not lying. Would you cut off your finger?

Hi Daniel, regarding your last question—in my opinion, if someone I really, really trust tells me this, I believe him that he believes it. But because of the weakness of this claim (God revealed Himself to Levi), I would prefer to look for another explanation (especially since it requires me to cut off a finger…) and I would say that he may be hallucinating, or something like that (that can happen even to normal people [rare, but possible in one form or another]).
–
But when a clear quantity of people I trust come along (the whole extended family, neighbors, teachers, etc. etc.) and make this claim—and they come to me missing a finger, as stated… [assuming I regard them as sane people]—here the weakness of the claim in the previous picture (that of the lone individual) disappears. And not for nothing was the Torah initially given in a ‘mass revelation’… (and after all, within Scripture there is a bold wager that there will not be another mass-witness claim of divine revelation).

Here it has already gained much greater plausibility than in the previous picture (and not for nothing are so many mentally healthy people missing a finger (!); they are actually certain that God commanded them directly). Assuming there is philosophical value to fulfilling the divine command (religious value), then I have an opportunity to fulfill the command to cut off a finger. And it is very, very likely that this comes from Him, may He be exalted. If I cast doubt on that, then it may be that even if I were standing at the foot of Mount Sinai and heard God actually “say” the first two utterances, I would probably still cast doubt on it. (Doubt can be cast on anything; the goal is to understand what is most acceptable, not what is “certain” [because there is no certainty in any field {except mathematics}]).
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I think the correct analogy to draw from this part of The First Existent is to understand that what is really being tested is the “recipient of the testimony”: is he inwardly prepared to accept such testimony at all? If not, then there is no need to go as far as testimony— even if he himself experiences it afterward, he will try to run away from it. (As Leibowitz said: “A person must accept upon himself faith in God”… and only from that point on is it possible to grasp God; until then it does not begin.)

Best,
Daniel Koren 🙂

Daniel Koren,
Why, if it is one person, does it seem more likely to you that it is a hallucination rather than a revelation?
And if it is many people, why is it more likely that it is a revelation rather than a hallucination?
Statistically, neither is likely. It is very hard to choose which is less likely.

Hi Daniel,
Let me just open by saying that the reason I might reject the testimony of an individual is not because I do not believe in divine revelation itself (quite the opposite—the philosophical reasoning makes it worth waiting for); rather, because it is not something routine (a rare event, but probabilistically possible [unlikely, but possible]), and he may be hallucinating, and therefore in my view it is proper to reject the message of his testimony until renewed evidence appears. A hallucination can stem from a practical mistake (that is, we need not assume we are dealing with a fraud; I really do believe him that he believes himself. It’s just that I don’t know exactly what, but somehow something happened here that tilted his epistemological consciousness in such a way. One can imagine many hypotheses, and this is not the place), and therefore it seems more acceptable to me not to be persuaded, at least on the practical level (cutting off a finger… that’s no joke), until he brings further evidence besides his testimony.

But here we are dealing with mass testimony. If we are dealing with people presumed sane (family, friends, teachers, neighbors, etc. etc.), I think there is no comparison between the doubtful hallucination of one individual and intensive mass testimony (or perhaps “mass hallucination,” same thing). It is itself amazing how our consciousness manages to transmit symmetrically to all people even the simplest things, the hard physical things, all the more so psychology, etc. etc. And to say that all of them hallucinated the same hallucination—that already, in my opinion, has vanishingly small probability. (Hallucinations are supposed to be disordered and subjective, stemming from a person’s soul, and the very fact that they all hallucinated a shared hallucination means it is very possible that there was something objective there… [but that enters a different philosophy].

And furthermore—that they all came to me with fingers cut off (“practice what you preach”), meaning they were fully certain in their souls of the divine revelation they had experienced… (!)
And once again, as I said in the last paragraph of my previous response, the question is: if God were to reveal Himself to me—would I accept it?
If yes—then there is no reason not to accept mass testimony (what could be stronger than that?).
And if I would reject a private revelation… then obviously the discussion is empty from the start (!), and as the Rabbi said above, there’s nothing to do with extreme skepticism…

The whole point of the story of revelation is so that those who believe in sorcery, prophets, lunatics, and the rest of the charlatans won’t go after them.

And I’m just using your parable of the finger (and sharpened it a bit, that they come to me as mass testimony missing a finger). Obviously, next to the biblical witness argument this is a walking joke, relatively speaking. (Like comparing 50 kilos to a ton, roughly—I wouldn’t call it a perfect analogy, except that both have mass.
Best,
Daniel, and good and blessed night, my brother.

Again I say: statistically, neither a mass hallucination nor a mass revelation has ever happened in the world as we know it. So it seems to me that they are equally unlikely.
Why did you decide that mass revelation is more likely?

To Daniel. A very fine question. I’m trying to suggest that mass hallucination cannot have a rational explanation, whereas mass revelation actually can (especially in light of the philosophical introduction about God’s existence and the claim that He has some purpose in creating the world). So both are obviously unlikely, but only one of them is also irrational. Therefore I accept testimony for the second.

The Last Decisor. I’m unable to reply directly to what you wrote. Your claim is fascinating and I think there is deep truth in it. Could you elaborate? It’s fascinating and thought-provoking.

Hi Daniel, I explained why there is a distinction, and it is a big one.
Before sharpening the distinction, I’ll just posit that there is an a priori assumption that this is indeed possible—for a person who believes in God. It just is not proportionally likely in every generation taken by itself, but from the dawn of history until the end of days, it is not only possible but actually quite needed. (For the reason gil mentioned above.)
That is to say, it is not “absurd.” But it is a strong claim in proportion to any single generation taken by itself (I hope my point is clear, the distinction regarding each generation on its own), and therefore the burden of proof is on the one claiming an individual revelation. (And his testimony alone is not enough, for the reasonable reason I detailed above.)

But in mass testimony, in my opinion it is not logically possible for a huge number of people to experience exactly the same hallucination. A hallucination is subjective (as I explained at length in my previous message—I invite you to look there again; maybe now my intention there will be clearer to you, in the second paragraph), and the moment it matches an innumerable sum of souls together, that is impossible. (I’m unsure whether to define that as a “psychotic failure.”) So if there is such testimony—and it is clear to me that all the witnesses are sure of it with one heart, to the point that they uprooted their fingers—then apparently it is objective (from a single source).
And a priori, divine revelation is also possible (not likely, but what is unlikely is not impossible, and once there is proof in the form of mass testimony…), then this is sufficient proof. And it is not at all comparable to individual testimony.
Basically that is my explanation. If you have objections, please don’t ask in a general way—be specific, so that I can understand exactly which points are not sitting well.
If you still have a difficulty, before you raise it (and only if you do), I would like you to answer the basic question: a priori—is revelation of God possible?
Sorry for the hour; good night, my brother.

gil,
According to your claim, even if it is just one person claiming he had a revelation, we should prefer the possibility that it really is a revelation rather than a hallucination—because only revelation has a rational explanation.
What rational explanation could there be for the hallucination of an individual?
By the way, most phenomena that happen in our world have no rational explanation. Why are there stars? Why are there spiders? Why do we happen to have 5 fingers?… and so on.

Daniel Koren,
I don’t know why you decided that a hallucination is something subjective. There are certain substances that cause chemical effects on the brain that produce very similar hallucinations in many people, like visions of colors and shapes.
Now let’s examine what the mass experience at Mount Sinai was.
It is not written in the Bible that they heard the first two utterances; that is a later interpretation from the tannaitic period. The only thing written in the Bible that can be defined as a supernatural phenomenon is “seeing the sounds.” The rest of the things that happened in the biblical Mount Sinai event—smoke, the sound of the shofar, etc.—are natural things, and one cannot say of them that they are divine revelation.
One of the common effects of certain psychotic drugs is synesthesia (sensory mixing). In many cases, sounds create visions of colors and shapes because the senses get mixed up. And there you have it: “seeing the sounds.”

Hello Daniel, first of all—you didn’t answer my question at the end: a priori, “is revelation of God possible?” (If not, then obviously there is nothing to discuss.)
And you are not right, my friend. The most basic reading of the verses indicates that the whole people heard the utterances from God. (True, the verses do not distinguish between 2 utterances and 10 utterances, and that is not so important either; the principle is the same whether 2 or 10.)
“Then the Lord said to Moses: Behold, I am coming to you in a thick cloud, so that the people may hear when I speak with you, and also believe in you forever,” (which implies that at the time of the thick cloud, my speech will be revealed to all the people). And behold: “And it came to pass on the third day, when it was morning, that there were sounds and lightnings, and a heavy cloud upon the mountain, and the sound of the shofar exceedingly loud, and all the people in the camp trembled.” And then a few verses later—the Ten Utterances…
I don’t like stuffing the discussion with verses, but it simply seems to me a failed understanding to say that the people only “saw the sounds.” That is secondary, not primary. The people heard.
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that the whole people heard all ten utterances… all the more so, right?
–
Uniform speech to everyone in their heads—is that not a supernatural phenomenon? (As if everyone had headphones and heard God’s speech? At full volume.)
–
In order for a hallucination, or any phenomenon in the world of phenomena, to be uniform among many people, it needs an objective connection in the world of things-in-themselves (Kant’s connection between “phenomena” and “noumena”).
And then human epistemology translates it into the same sign. Sound waves or light waves are translated in all our heads into the same spectacle because there is a rigid and uniform source for everyone in that wave.

The same applies here: if everyone experiences the same experience (hearing the ten [!] utterances by God), then there is a rigid source that translated this into a mass experience… (God?)

The basis is this: if revelation is possible a priori, and reliable mass testimony reaches me from witnesses who experienced this all at the same time, is it more reasonable to accept that there was revelation? Do you agree? And if not, please explain…

And I would be happy to reply to you in gil’s place; there is a flaw in your wording. But that is not my task for the moment.

I decided to explain why, in my opinion, the terminology in your message to gil is flawed. I explained at length in my messages above: all the anti-rationality in mass testimony lies in the fact that there is no explanation that can describe how everyone experienced exactly the same objective experience (assuming reliable people come to us and tell us about exactly the same experience). If it was a hallucination, it should not have been one-to-one among a large number of people. And when uniform mass testimony arrives, it is not rational to say that it was a “hallucination.”
Whereas “revelation” explains everything: it was directed to the psychological consciousness of all those present at the foot of the mountain. (And therefore it was uniform. [Try examining how many words appear between “I am the Lord your God” and “and showing kindness to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments” {which is the end of the second utterance—and according to the plain biblical sense, perhaps all the way to the end of the Ten Utterances… in general! It is astonishing how so many intelligent words entered so many witnesses all at once. There should have been enormous chaos there, not “order”—in the spirit of the second law of thermodynamics.}])
However, in mass testimony the whole problem is solved from the outset. (And according to the law of excluded middle, one must choose the option [between the only two] that is not a logical fallacy [for one who accepts “revelation” a priori].) By contrast, in individual testimony there is no problem of irrationality (of extreme unity amid a vast multiplicity of minds). It is simply more reasonable to choose individual hallucination (or some other excuse) rather than individual revelation.
Gil should forgive me; it was just on the tip of my tongue…

Yes, of course revelation of God is possible.
And maybe here you are touching on the main problem. The whole Mount Sinai event is told in language laden with metaphors, and there is no order in the story (what happened first and what happened afterward).
If you read the story of Mount Sinai cleanly, without preconceptions, you will see that it is almost impossible to understand anything clearly from the biblical language. And it can bear many interpretations.
And it is not at all necessary from the text that the Israelites heard the Ten Utterances.
The Ten Utterances open with the verse:
“And Moses went down to the people and said to them. And God spoke all these words, saying: I am the Lord your God…” etc.
Which implies that Moses is saying this to the people of Israel.

Hi Daniel, no, my brother, I don’t agree with you. I think it is clearly seen from the overall set of verses that the people heard the voice of the Lord. (I agree it’s relatively jumbled, but the conclusion is simple.)
As for the citation you brought, it is the end of a section. (“And Moses said to the Lord, ‘The people cannot come up to Mount Sinai, for You warned us, saying: Set bounds for the mountain and sanctify it.’ And the Lord said to him, ‘Go down, and you shall come up, you and Aaron with you; but let not the priests and the people break through to come up to the Lord, lest He break forth upon them.’” And that is what the “And Moses went down to the people and said to them” is referring to.)

The beginning of God’s speech is a new and separate section. (“And God spoke all these words, saying…” and from here the Ten Utterances begin.)
From the overall set of verses, I simply do not see another interpretive possibility at all. One really has to work hard to interpret it otherwise in the overall context of these verses. That really is the plain sense of Scripture, in my humble opinion.

And after the Ten Utterances, the people turn to Moses in fear: “And they said to Moses, ‘You speak with us and we will hear; but let not God speak with us, lest we die…’” (What would be the initial assumption that God would speak? What does that have to do with anything? Obviously Moses is speaking, no? Rather, God spoke, and this was a traumatic experience for them, and they asked Moses that this thing not happen again for fear of death.)
And of course, if you want it black on white:
“And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Thus shall you say to the children of Israel: You yourselves have seen that I have spoken with you from heaven (!)’”
And there are countless verses, and I don’t want to flood the discussion. The explicit verse before the event is enough (“so that the people may hear when I speak with you,” etc.), and the explicit verse after the event (“you have seen… I have spoken with you”).

Why did you decide that the verse I brought is the end of a section? On what basis?
That is one possible interpretation, but not a necessary one.
When the Israelites say to Moses, “You speak with us,” it is not necessary that this comes after the Ten Utterances—there is no chronological order in the Torah.
And even if it is after the Ten Utterances, it is not at all necessary that God spoke with them. It may be that the sounds and lightning and the smoking mountain frightened them that God was about to speak with them, so they said this to Moses.
“So that the people may hear when I speak with you”—indeed, seemingly the Holy One, blessed be He, tells Moses that this will happen, but in the end it is not written that it happened. And it is not written that this refers to the Ten Utterances; perhaps it refers to another speech. In addition, it may be a metaphor, meaning that the people will hear the sounds and the lightning. After all, even according to the interpretive tradition, the words “spoke” and “hear” do not necessarily express actual speech and hearing like among human beings.
And the same applies to “You have seen… I have spoken with you.”
One can find many places in the Torah where the traditional commentators interpret similar verses that way.

Whoever thinks God spoke to a bunch of donkey-like idol worshipers is either a snake or a donkey.

Hello Daniel, good evening.
I won’t try to argue with your plain-sense readings (even though I am completely of the opinion that they are entirely refutable), but I will give the verse that delivers the knockout blow, and in my view uproots the skeleton of this discussion: “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Thus shall you say to the children of Israel: You yourselves have seen that I spoke with you from heaven.’”
Forget empty pilpul.
Even if you really exert yourself and succeed in changing the plain sense of the text (you can do that with any text; the question is whether you want to understand what the text says in its own plain sense, or what you are trying to impose on it), the circulation of everything together with the verse above (“you have seen” in the past tense, implying already happened) leaves no further interpretive option. (Of course one can try to interpret, but that doesn’t mean you can call it “interpretation.”)
That is my opinion, and of course I am no prophet, but rather a person who claims to be rational. Therefore, when my reason tells me this, I do not go searching for “what reason does not say” and trying to force harmonizations that are as clear as day and have no substance.

And of course we can remain in disagreement; that is perfectly fine. Good evening, brother.

Some of the plain-sense readings of mine that you think are completely refutable, empty pilpul, and forced explanations that are as clear as day to have no substance—are Nachmanides on the passage. See there.
Not that I am saying what Nachmanides says is the necessary interpretation. But it does mean that I’m not the only one who saw this interpretation as possible.
How do you understand from the plain sense of Scripture that “I spoke with you from heaven” means the Ten Utterances?

Daniel (you’ve got a nice name, brother), good morning. (I don’t know if I’ll reply here again, because it feels to me like we’ve already been grinding water too much.) I’ll try to expand one last time, and if it isn’t acceptable to you, I have no interest in persuading you more than this (and no desire either… I’m conducting an intelligent traditional conversation, I’m not a kiruv activist).
If, as you say, this is Nachmanides and so on, then apparently I haven’t studied enough and the deficiency is mine. Superficially it seemed to me refutable—apparently a deficiency in me.

As for the reason I understand that this means the Ten Utterances, it is the timing of everything. God says He will speak shortly in the thick cloud. Then the thick cloud arrives. Then there is dialogue between God and Moses. And all the people stand and wait. And then the Ten Utterances. It is very clear from the verses that God spoke to the people (even if one can argue and say that Moses spoke in His name; to me that is certainly less compelling. And even if the two plain-sense readings were equal for the sake of argument, still, because of the preparation for revelation beforehand, and the retrospective discussion of revelation afterward, the interpretation that Moses spoke becomes somewhere between a joke and an erroneous interpretation). And after the Ten Utterances, the people do not want God to speak anymore, because they fear they will die (to me that is of course consistent). And finally, the blow that gives the knockout is, as I wrote in my previous response, the verse adjacent to the Ten Utterances, where God says that the people saw that He spoke to them from heaven… etc. etc. It is very simple, and I don’t even see the point in arguing. (And I like arguments and like going deep, but when I feel there is a disagreement that has no point [like here], it burdens me.)

To conclude, I’ll lay it out:
A) Before the Mount Sinai event (which is, by all accounts, an exalted event), there was a promise from God that He would reveal Himself before all the people.
B) During the event, it is very clear to understand (one has to be very skeptical to try to understand otherwise) that God spoke the Ten Utterances before all Israel.
C) Close to the Ten Utterances, God said that they saw (already… when did they have time?) that He spoke to them from heaven.
Conclusion: in the Ten Utterances there was divine revelation (!) End of discussion. (I have no interest in restating it in other words. If you do not agree with the conclusion of the valid syllogism, then as far as I’m concerned either you haven’t studied enough, or you’re simply being overly clever. It is very simple to me, brother.)
Best,
Daniel.

If it is so clear that the meaning is the Ten Utterances, how does the Mekhilta say (and Rashi who brings it) that the meaning is only the first two utterances?

From the plain sense of Scripture it is clear that the meaning is the Ten Utterances.
Then the Oral Torah comes and introduces an enormous novelty: that after the second utterance, their souls departed (as some anonymous fellow here said, “idol-worshiping donkeys”—their bodies could not contain the prophetic holiness), and then they returned to life. (As stated, there is no chronological order in the Torah; that is not a tool of the plain sense of Scripture, of course.) And all the requests to Moses our rabbi were between the 2nd and 3rd utterances (after they returned to life… and did not want to die a second time).
But one must remember that this is an enormous novelty. It is definitely not the plain sense of Scripture…

Agreed, but that teaches you that according to the Oral Torah, the plain sense of Scripture is not necessarily reality. It may be that reality was x, while from the plain sense of Scripture it sounds like it was y.

I don’t see any problem. I heard that God, who created the world, commands us certain things, and it is clear to me that what He commands should be done. Why do I need the experience of revelation itself for that? Proof that there was revelation is enough for me.

You are right, my friend, but in my opinion, if the Oral Tradition had not introduced that reality was x, then as far as I’m concerned reality was y. (As written.)

Not sure at all.

Sorry I didn’t follow the fascinating discussion.
My question is: how can the person himself know that it is God speaking to him, and that it is not a dream?
How does that certainty express itself?
How can I know that it is from God and not from my own madness?

How can a person know that what he sees really exists there and is not an illusion? Revelation too is “seen,” even if not with the eyes of flesh, then with the eyes of the intellect (in Maimonides’ formulation at the beginning of The Guide of the Perplexed).