Faith Moves Mountains

“Hashem descended before the eyes of the entire People on Mount Sinai” (Shemos 19:11).

Without the Revelation of the Torah on Mount Sinai, the commandments given throughout the Torah would have no power to obligate anyone. For on that day, Heaven met earth, and the upper realms meshed with the lower realms, while the entire Jewish nation had a prophetic experience unlike any other, before or since. The impression of that enormous experience remains embedded in every Jew’s DNA to this day. That moment was the turning point of history, surpassing the boundaries of all previous human experience. From the moment that Hashem voiced the Aseres Hadibros, the world became a different place. Even the skeptics who cling to rationalist theories and reject any bothersome fact that doesn’t fit the philosophical framework they’ve created, are flummoxed by this event, provided, of course, that they have done their research seriously and are thoroughly familiar with the data they are dealing with.

Here is how things looked to early 20th-century secular Bible scholar Professor Yehezkel Kaufmann:

“Indeed, the Israelite faith, which emerged from an entirely new idea, split the world into two — an idolatrous world and an Israelite world. From the point of view of form, it could be said that in the final analysis, this is merely a unique innovation of the human spirit. But from the point of view of content, it cannot be seen that way. We must assume that what we have here is a special act of Hashgachah.  But with this assumption we have in fact left the territory of experiential history and entered the territory of faith…” (Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of Israel, Introduction).