MSD is Mount Sinai Difficulty. It’s one of the most common difficulties Jews have with Judaism. Some events, even if recorded by a thousand cameras and broadcast worldwide, are just too extraordinary to accept. It took years for the world to accept that the Wright Brothers were flying in the air, even after trainloads of people had witnessed it. Similarly, although the evidence for the Mount Sinai Event is difficult to dispute, people remain skeptical nonetheless.

The Mount Sinai Event is the central event of Jewish history, theology and consciousness. It is the shared memory of an entire people who claim to have heard the Creator of the Universe speaking to them en masse. It’s far too outrageous to be a myth — how could you possibly convince an entire nation of such an event if it never happened? People would say, “Why did my father never tell me any of this?” The very fact that no other people ever came up with anything like it screams out its veracity. So why is it so difficult to accept?

Mount Sinai Difficulty stems principally from the way it is conventionally presented: A Big Booming Voice intimidates from the heavens, declaring ten do’s and don’ts that you had better follow or else. It makes G-d look like a complete outsider, spamming the universe by breaking the rules. It reinforces a very dualistic conception of theology: There is G-d and there is a world, and the only way G-d can relate to the world is by being the Big Bully.

The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneersohn, presents the Mount Sinai Event in fascinatingly different terms. Especially fascinating because nothing he’s saying is really new — it’s just what the classical sources were saying all along.

Take, for example, the Zohar: “There was no place from whence He did not speak…”, or the Talmud: “They looked to the east and saw the voice, to the west, … from each direction they saw the voice speaking: ‘Anochi’—‘ I am the Eternal, your G-d’.” Not a Big Booming Voice from heaven, but the voice of each thing in heaven and earth.

Now imagine being there at the foot of Mt. Sinai, amidst the entire multimedia explosion, looking about and seeing how each rock and shrub is screaming, “Anochi!”. Every limb of every person about you, every limb of your own, all screaming the same thing. Even every memory of the past, as well as visions of the future, all screaming, “Anochi!”.

Basically, you’re receiving a new vision of the same old world: That which a moment ago appeared to be just a world, now reveals that it is no more than G-d speaking to you.

As for the ten ‘thou shalts and thou shants’— those, the Rebbe declares, were incidental. The forefront experience was the simple fact that G-d could be heard through each element of the world. The media was the message.

Somehow, that’s much easier to accept. After all, why shouldn’t history have its lucid moments and space its transparent surfaces? Even in the best of puppet shows, the puppeteer’s hand is occasionally exposed and the puppets seen for what they really are: no more than extensions of someone’s imagination. Here too, the world’s facade of independence was briefly stripped away, and the world was seen for what it really is: Nothing more than G-d communicating with human consciousness.

It also makes sense of a few other issues:

For one, tradition tells us there was no echo when G-d spoke. Big Booming Voices always have echoes. But if each thing was resonating with the same voice, then of course nothing would bounce it back as an echo. Because each thing in the world was a part of the revelation.

But in the above context, audio communication makes sense. They **saw** a physical world — the same one we always live in. They heard **that world** saying ‘Anochi’. That is the whole point of Torah: Not us leaving the world to a higher reality, but G-d becoming apparent in the artifacts of the everyday world. This is the meaning of ‘G-d **descended** upon Mount Sinai’ — G-d, so to speak, got down to earth. He became accessible in the mundane.

And a third resolution: The Torah was given in a wilderness, the Midrash says, because a wilderness belongs to whoever enters it. If it had happened in some special place like Mount Moriah, it would have just been “special” things saying “Anochi”. It wouldn’t have the universality of saying, “Every detail of the entire universe is speaking to you and saying, ‘Anochi’”.

...the world was seen for what it really is: Nothing more than G-d communicating with human consciousness

Last year, when I told this to a group of people, a woman taught me something. She had just discovered that all her unbearable aches and pains were symptoms of something called fibromyalgia. “Fibromyalgia,” she wrote, “is G-d, too.”

Mount Sinai was when the curtains were temporarily pulled back, and with a brief glance we saw that the whole show is nothing more than G-d speaking to us. Even the empty wilderness.

Now, you may be thinking, "Were you saying that the rocks, etc., spoke with literal voices and that that was what the people heard?"

I know how you feel… : ). Actually, whenever I think of the rocks “talking,” the image of malleable, bouncy rocks with smiley, singing human faces straight out of Disney come to mind! But of course, that’s nonsense. What I meant was this.

All the world is created by a Divine “voice”, as recounted in Genesis over and over again, “And the All-Powerful SAID… and so it was.” The Midrash explains that, since the Eternal and His words are beyond time, this is an ongoing process: Those original forces of creation that are called “His words” are continuously sustaining all of the creation. As the Baal Shem Tov put it, if those words would be removed from Creation, all of it would return to the absolute void that preceded creation.

In total, there are ten Divine Utterances that were used to create the world in the six days of Creation. The “inner soul”, so to speak, of these utterances is contained in the Ten Commandments of the Torah—since the Torah is the inner soul of all the cosmos. This is stated in the Zohar. It is this inner soul of the creation that the Jewish people realized at Mount Sinai.

Our job is to reveal that inner voice within each thing through the ways of the Torah.