Israel Died at Sinai and Was Kissed Back to Life

The Torah describes the revelation at Sinai in a handful of verses. The rabbis of the second and third centuries, reading those verses with the intensity of people who believed every syllable had been chosen by the Author of the universe, found within them an event of almost unbearable immediacy -- not a distant proclamation from a mountain, but something that touched every single person in the camp, breath by breath, word by word, life and death and life again.

When the first commandment rang out, the people survived it. When the second commandment rang out, they died. This is not metaphor in the midrashic reading preserved in the school of midrash aggadah, probably compiled in the Land of Israel before the 7th century CE. The people actually fell. The force of the Divine speech was a physical reality that human bodies could not contain. Then God revived them -- quickened them, in the old language -- and they rose and said to Moses: we cannot bear to hear any more of the voice of the Holy One. If we hear it again, we will die as we just died. The plea was not cowardice. It was an honest report from people who had just experienced death by proximity to the infinite, and did not want to experience it again.

God heard their voice. And it pleased Him.

This detail is easy to pass over, but the rabbis stop on it. The people refused direct revelation, and God's response was not disappointment but something the text calls pleasure. Why? Because the request was honest, and because God had already arranged for what came next. He sent Michael and Gabriel, two of the highest archangels, who took Moses by his two hands -- against his will, the text specifies -- and brought him into the thick darkness where God was.

Moses did not volunteer for that particular darkness. He was carried.

Now read alongside this the extraordinary passage from the Song of Songs midrash -- the Midrash Rabbah on Shir HaShirim, developed in the same rabbinic world of late antiquity -- where the verse about the kisses of the beloved's mouth is interpreted as a description of how the commandments were actually delivered. Rabbi Yohanan taught: an angel would take each utterance from before the Holy One and carry it to every single Israelite in the camp. To each one, the angel would say: do you accept this utterance upon yourself? Here are the laws in it, here are the punishments, here are the commandments and the rewards. And the person would say: yes. And the angel would ask: do you accept the divinity of the Holy One? And the person would say: yes, yes. And immediately the angel would kiss him on the mouth.

The kiss was not symbolic. The Israelite camp was eighteen mil by eighteen mil -- a vast territory of perhaps two million people, by the tradition's count. Each commandment circulated through that entire camp, going to each person individually, gathering consent, delivering revelation in a form each individual could receive without dying. The rabbis debated exactly how many commandments Israel heard directly from God's mouth before asking Moses to serve as intermediary: Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said two -- the first two, Anokhi and Lo Yihye Lekha. A numerical argument supported him: the word Torah has a numerical value of 611, which equals the number of commandments Moses transmitted. The remaining 2, out of 613 total, came directly, kissed by the Divine speech itself.

The Rabbis who disagreed -- those who said Israel heard all the commandments directly -- still had to account for the same verse: you spoke to us and we will hear. They resolved it by arguing there is no strict chronological order in the Torah. Perhaps that plea came after only two or three commandments. The debate is not resolved, and the midrash does not pretend to resolve it. What it preserves instead is the image: divine words moving through a massive camp like individual letters in a living alphabet, each one finding its particular human recipient, each one making its particular request and receiving its particular yes before the kiss came.

Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, one of the great figures of the second century CE, described the physical path of each utterance: it emerged from the right side of the Holy One, traveled to the left of Israel, circumnavigated the entire camp -- all eighteen by eighteen mil of it -- and returned from the right of Israel to the left of the Holy One, who received it and inscribed it on the tablet. The sound of this passage went from one end of the earth to the other. The Psalm says: the voice of the Lord hews flames of fire (Psalms 29:7). This was what that looked like from the inside.

The two accounts belong together. In one, the people die and God sends archangels to drag Moses unwilling into the darkness where revelation continues without the people present. In the other, each commandment travels on foot, as it were, through every row of every tent, sitting down with each person, explaining itself, waiting for consent, and sealing the agreement with a kiss. Death and intimacy. The overwhelming force that kills and the tender word that persuades. Sinai contained both, and the rabbis refused to choose between them. Both are what happened when heaven and earth met in the desert, and both are part of what it means that Israel died that day and came back.