If the verses are only a metaphor and nothing more, what exactly does the tradition testify to — to the metaphor that describes something unclear whose actual occurrence we do not know, namely the revelation?

If God can reveal Himself by means of something that represents Him, why not reveal Himself to the whole people in some way? What is this great concealment if it is just some sort of garment showing His presence? Is it not within His power to embody Himself in a way that everyone could see His revelation?

And similarly regarding the voice — could He not have lowered the intensity?

The tradition testifies that there was a revelation. Why does it matter what the “face” or the “back” mentioned by the verse were? I also do not know the color of the smoke that dissipated at Sinai.

And as for the intensity, I hope you weren’t asking seriously. In any case, it seems we’ve exhausted this.

Because if we do not know how the revelation took place (I always thought the tradition testified to what is written in the Torah, but according to you it is merely a metaphor), how do we know it was a revelation? It could have been some event that was actually a natural phenomenon, or a mass gathering that brought people to some elevated emotional state and nothing more.

And regarding the voice — I absolutely was asking seriously. Could God not have adjusted His voice and presence so that the whole people would perceive and hear it with their own eyes and ears?!

The more limited the revelation itself is, and the fewer people it is directed toward, the more its credibility is undermined (similar to the traditions of the other religions).

And if the testimony is to what is indeed written in the Torah, how do you know they did not imagine it or misinterpret it? And how do you know that what is in the Torah itself is not just made up?
As for the voice, this is not about volume. A voice that has a close connection to God is apparently unbearable for human beings. Maybe it could have been adjusted, but it could also be conveyed through Moses. And it is possible that it cannot be adjusted, as Rashba writes in Responsum 234 in volume 4, where he discusses the impossibility of giving prophecy to someone who is not on the level of prophecy.

The whole point of the testimony argument is reliance on the book of the Torah, which tells of revelation before the masses and is backed by a tradition of transmitting the Torah from generation to generation. If what is written in the Torah is fabricated or only metaphorical, the whole story is shaken, because we do not know the correct details. It turns into folklore, like the revelations of Jesus and his apostles, the revelation of the angel Gabriel, or the story of the Golem of Prague.

As for the voice and the visual revelation, I do not know Rashba’s remarks about prophecy, but in prophecy God wants to reveal Himself only to a prophet who is at a certain level, I assume. At Sinai it seems that God wanted the whole people to hear Him and did not succeed, so He changed the method and spoke through an emissary. If He is all-powerful, then presumably He could have adapted Himself to the audience. If He could not adapt, then He is limited in His abilities.

These are the usual insistences, and from my experience it’s a waste of time. I’m done.

In fairness, is the insistence two-sided?

In fairness, no. Not at all. Repeating the same claims again and again is insistence.

If the answer did not answer the question, or was not understood by the questioner, asking again from a slightly different angle or in different words is not negative insistence, but a desire to clarify things. See the case of Rabbi Perida’s student. Not everyone understands immediately; “the bashful person cannot learn,” and so on.

From what it seems to me, to insist that there was a revelation, but that its description in the Torah may be fabricated, or that those present imagined it and therefore one should not give weight to the factual description in the Torah because it may be only a metaphor — yet still there is a tradition that there was a revelation, though its details are shrouded in fog whose color is not even known, and the Torah is indeed from Heaven but it does not matter what is described in it — that sounds like a much greater insistence. Maybe only to me this comes across like a strange jumble, but that is what I have understood so far. Please.

Also, no answer was given here regarding the difficulty of God’s presence taking visual and vocal form at the revelation. Why did He not adapt Himself to the occasion if His will was to reveal Himself? It may be somewhat like the paradox of whether He can create a stone He cannot lift, but it is not the same thing, because He could have revealed Himself in a way suited to the audience and solved the paradox — rather than showing His “back” (even if that is a metaphor) only to a few, and having His voice knock out those who were supposed to hear His words. If He wanted to reveal Himself, then He should reveal Himself properly to those before whom He wanted to appear.

In any case, thank you for taking the time to respond and for the platform. May all be well (if that is possible).

If things are not moving forward, it is worth letting go and waiting for understanding to come on its own. There are many topics where the answer comes after some time, and topics where it never comes. One can reflect, read more, think again about the issue. There is no need to wear the Rabbi out again and again and again.

Y.D., I accept your rebuke. My question and my insistence (I accept the claim for the sake of argument) stem from the fact that this genuinely troubles me; it is not just some unresolved point in an obscure topic. These are the foundations of religion and faith / belief, and that matters at every moment.

I do not think I will let go and wait; I will try to investigate by other means — perhaps I will find an answer that satisfies me. I hope. It may be that the way I insisted here before the local authority was not respectful.
Forgive me.

Now that I think about it, the site owner’s intuition actually gives you the best answer you’re going to get. They saw the revelation with the eyes of the intellect, not with fleshly eyes. The voices and lightning were only the stage setting for the real thing. My question goes in the opposite direction: how did the Holy One, blessed be He, reveal Himself if “no human can see Me and live”? But that is a question the Torah intentionally leaves open.

I explained my claim in very simple words. You can accept it or not, but I do not understand why there is any need to repeat this. I claim that there is a tradition (which in my view is reliable, much more so than other traditions, but for all I care you can believe those too) that there was a revelation. The question of its description in the Torah and what that description means is irrelevant. The Torah does not establish the tradition; the tradition establishes the Torah. One can write all kinds of things in books. The fact that something is written in a book proves nothing, whether the book is clear or not. So I really do not understand this entire discussion. You can say that those present at Sinai hallucinated everything and therefore you do not accept the tradition — fine. But what does that have to do with the unequivocalness of the description in the Torah? It is that linkage, and repeating it over and over after I explained this, that I call insistence.
The reliability of a historical account is a matter of judgment and impression, and it is hard to give clear criteria for it. But that is a completely different question from the question of the clarity and unequivocalness of the description in the text.

And again, this has absolutely nothing to do with my honor, or honor in general. My problem is with the form and content of the discussion, not with wording or respect. I have made clear more than once in the past what my attitude is toward questions of manners and etiquette. They do not really interest me, and in any case here there was certainly no such problem.

Thank you for the explanation. It is new to me that the Torah together with tradition, as one unit, do not prove and reinforce one another. But if that is so, then the Torah was transmitted through tradition, and part of what my father passed on to me from his father is the Torah as it is, and he told me that the Torah was given at Sinai when God revealed Himself — as described in the Torah: “You have seen that I spoke with you from Heaven.” Therefore, as I understand it, the story as written in the Torah has to be part of that tradition. If I cast doubt on the details and description of events in the text, I am essentially rejecting what my father told me in the name of my grandfather. In other words, how can one separate the text of the Torah from the tradition and claim that these two do not necessarily overlap?

I will set aside the second question for now, because if it is clarified that the biblical story does not have to match historical reality, then I have no reason to ask questions about what may be only a metaphor or fabrication.

I hope this counts as a question of clarification and not insistence.

P.S. In what I wrote above to Y.D., I understood that if to an outside observer it seemed I had not acted properly, then probably I was the one who had behaved improperly, and I accepted what he said. Thanks for the final remark; there was certainly no issue of disrespect, but from Y.D.’s words I was concerned.

Let me sharpen it further. The text of the Torah plays no role at all in this point. The fact that something is written in a book gives it no standing whatsoever. Anyone can write anything in a book. Only the tradition plays a role here. The tradition says that the Torah was received there and passed down to us. If I believe the tradition, then my conclusion is that there was an event there and the Torah was given there. That then circles back and validates the commandments written in the Torah, that is, the content of the Torah.
The story of the Sinai event that appears in the Torah is irrelevant to the discussion of whether it happened or how it happened. It may be a metaphor, an invention, or an authentic description. As I said, it is the tradition that conveys the event to us, and only by its force is the Torah validated and its content given standing.
Therefore the question of the reliability or clarity of the description of the Sinai event in the Torah itself is irrelevant to the discussion. We do not live by its mouth. As far as I am concerned, the Sinai event is what the tradition says it is (allowing, of course, for embellishments and flourishes; I am not claiming every detail in the tradition is reliable). If you want to interpret the verses of the event themselves, interpret them according to the tradition. That is if the verses matter at all (to me they do not, because from verses one cannot learn anything).

Thank you for sharpening the point. With your permission, if I may, and if I understood correctly, tradition is basically just a folk legend passed down from generation to generation and nothing more. If so, what is the difference between that and, for example, the legend of the Golem of Prague, or that Jesus walked on water and healed the sick? I saw that you wrote that as far as you are concerned I may believe those too, but it does not seem to me that you assign equal weight to those legends — why not? Is it because in Prague there were presumably fewer people than at the foot of Sinai, and Jesus’ disciples in the boat on the Sea of Galilee and the many who crowded around in Capernaum did not number six hundred thousand (some have claimed it means 600 families and not 600,000 men, and in any case this is the Torah’s wording for “many,” but that is a longer discussion), only “many”?

And regarding the biblical text, what are the chances that if the text and the historical revelation were not identical at the start, over the years they would not have moved closer to each other until they became identical? My father at least told me about the Sinai event as described in the text of the Torah and in the Sages; presumably that is how he received it from his father, who received it from his grandfather. For example, if I tell my son about our family lineage and then later give him a written family tree, and there are contradictions between the oral story and the written tree, he will try to clarify what is correct and what is not, and in the end he will either correct the tree or decide that I was mistaken in the story. The tree and the story that he then passes on to my grandson will presumably be identical (not necessarily that he will arrive at the truth, but the story and the text will match, and one will “correct” the other).

If I am right in this assumption, then one necessarily has to give weight to the text and to the plain description, and there is no room to say that it is merely a metaphor.

Maimonides treated Genesis as allegorical description, and everywhere there is an angel in a biblical story as a vision in a dream, but presumably he did not say that about the description of the Sinai event — or am I mistaken in that too?

I do not know how you got that from what I said. Tradition is not a folk legend but tradition. From generation to generation they transmit that these were the facts. What does that have to do with the Golem? As for Christianity, as I wrote to you, if it seems reliable to you, go with it.
The fact that they tell you the matter as described in the Torah means nothing. The tradition is transmitted from generation to generation, and they transmit it by way of the Torah’s verses.
Here I am really done. That’s it.

If they tell me as described in the Torah, and that is how it goes from generation to generation, then the description and the Torah verses are, therefore, an integral part of the tradition.

Thank you for everything.