Sinai Was Chosen Because It Was Small

When Moses first encountered God, it was not at a mountain. It was at a bush -- a small desert shrub that burned without being consumed, ordinary except for the fire. God called to him from within the bush, and Moses turned aside to look. The choice of location was significant: not a mountain, not a storm, not a tower. A bush.

This beginning matters for understanding why Sinai was chosen for the giving of Torah. The episode of Sinai's selection among all mountains is a recurring theme across the midrashic corpus. The Midrash Tanchuma, a collection of homiletical teachings organized around the Torah portions and compiled in its present form in the seventh to ninth centuries of the common era though drawing on much earlier materials, preserves a meditation on the sequence of places where God spoke to Moses before the Tent of Meeting was erected. First the bush. Then Egypt, when God addressed Moses and Aaron together in the land of oppression. Then Midian, where the text explicitly says "the Lord spoke to Moses in Midian." Then Sinai itself.

Each location before the Tent of Meeting was provisional, a place God came to meet Moses because there was no permanent dwelling yet. But once the Tent stood, the Holy One adopted a policy of privacy. The verse from Micah is invoked: "to walk humbly with your God." Modesty became the principle. God would speak with Moses inside the Tent, in that intimate enclosed space, because modesty is appropriate for the one called a king's daughter -- and Moses, the text argues, is just that. He was the king of Torah, which is called strength, and "all the glory of a king's daughter is within."

The choice of Sinai over other mountains followed the same logic. Other mountains were higher, more imposing, more visually dramatic. Sinai was small. In the rabbinic imagination, the mountains competed: each one argued for its own worthiness as the site of the revelation. Carmel came forward. Tabor presented itself. Sinai did not argue. Its very smallness was its qualification. The Torah -- which requires not a mighty conqueror but a humble recipient -- would rest on the mountain that did not demand it.

And then Israel arrived at Sinai. And the disaster that followed is the sharpest possible commentary on the gap between the principle and the practice.

The story of the Golden Calf, as preserved in the Midrash Rabbah on Numbers, begins with a detail the Torah text makes easy to miss. When Moses ascended to receive the Torah, the elders were with him. He left them waiting. He told Israel he would descend at the end of forty days. When he tarried, the people became terrified. The text says they saw that Moses "delayed" -- and the word used, boshesh, is glossed by the Sages through another verse, where the same word describes the delay of chariots expected to return from war. Israel thought their leader was dead. Or gone. Or had abandoned them.

They went to the elders first. The elders refused: why are you provoking the One who performed miracles for you? The people did not accept this answer. They killed the elders. Then they went to Hur, who stood and confronted them with harsh words. They killed him too. All the elders of Israel, the seventy who had ascended the mountain with Moses -- murdered at the foot of Sinai, at the very place where God had spoken from fire.

Aaron, when the crowd pressed against him, could see what had happened to Hur. He understood, from the body of the slaughtered man before him, what would happen to anyone who resisted. The text says he "built an altar" and the midrash reads the verb: he understood from the one who had been sacrificed before him. He bought time. He asked them to bring gold. He thought perhaps they would delay, perhaps Moses would return.

Moses did not return in time. The calf was cast. And the seventy elders who died defending the principle of the one God at the foot of the mountain God chose for its humility -- those men received, the Sages say, their replacements eventually. When Moses was later commanded to gather seventy men to receive the spirit of prophecy, God said explicitly: "He shatters the powerful without number and sets others in their place." The new seventy were standing in for those who died at Sinai. The ones who could not be persuaded to dishonor the covenant.

The arc from the burning bush to the shattered Tablets to the appointment of new elders is, in this reading, a single story about where holiness lives. Not in the grandest mountain. Not in the most imposing leader. In the small place, the humble threshold, the ones who would not bend even when everyone around them was bending. Sinai was chosen because it was small. The elders who died there were, in that moment, Sinai.