That Quiet Disrupting Voice
As we get closer to Shavuot, the holiday celebrating the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, I am thinking about God’s voice. Our tradition claims that God has a voice; indeed, the world was created through God’s speech. Let’s stipulate that there is some wisdom and truth in this claim. What does God’s voice sound like? How do we go about hearing it? This is not a rhetorical question. I really want to know.
Our tradition has some ideas. Although the Sinai story itself is loud and filled with thunder and shofar blasts, there is a clear sense that the Divine voice is actually much quieter. The story of Elijah, who revisited Mt. Sinai after a troubling and violent showdown with the prophets of Ba’al, tells us that God was actually not in the storm or the earthquake. Instead, there was a “still small voice,” or maybe another translation might be “a voice of delicate stillness.” The Hassidic movement picked up this insight with a number of teachings that perhaps all the Israelites heard at Mt. Sinai was the first letter of the Ten Commandments, the letter aleph, a silent letter. Delicate stillness indeed.
This makes sense to me. I don’t know anyone who has heard a booming voice of God. But something smaller and quieter might be possible. How do we listen for that?
In trauma healing work, we often start by exploring what gets in the way of what we most want for ourselves. R. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the brilliant rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto, identified two things that prevent us from hearing God’s voice: We are blocked emotionally and we are unable to concentrate. He believed that if we practiced paying more sustained attention to the subtle emotions that arise and pass, we would have greater intimacy with our own souls and our souls know how to hear God’s voice.
That is interesting. I check in with my own experience. I would tentatively say that I have “heard” God “speaking” twice. The content of the messages was quite different from one another; one was an expression of love and a call to service, while the other was an experience of being pulled up short and spiritually smacked down. What they had in common was that they were both utterly unexpected. In both cases, I was not expecting a “spiritual experience” and I certainly was not expecting the content of the messages. In both cases, I spontaneous began to cry, and in both cases, as a result, I had to change my life, to paraphrase the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
Did the Israelites expect to hear the voice of God when they received the Torah? Do we expect to experience some form of revelation on Shavuot? Perhaps it is a wrong expectation. Perhaps it is like Passover in that sometimes (perhaps even often) we do not actually experience a sense of release towards liberation on Passover, despite the exhortation that we see ourselves as if we ourselves left Egypt. But on Passover we remind ourselves that liberation is possible. On Shavuot we may or may not hear that quiet disrupting Voice. But we remind ourselves to be open to the possibility.