The Voice That Could Break Cedars Entered Only One Ear

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The Tent Stood Finished and Empty

The last cord was tied, the last curtain hung straight, and then nobody moved. Moses stood at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting with the smell of fresh dye and beaten gold still hanging in the air. Past the screen, the Ark waited under its lid of pure gold, and on that lid two cherubim faced each other with their wings arched high, hammered out of a single block, one wingtip almost grazing the other. Between them there was nothing. Only air, and the shadow the wings laid down across it.

He had built the room before he had ever heard the Voice speak inside it. Now he lifted the screen and stepped through, and the empty air between the two golden figures began to speak his name.

A Voice That Had Broken the Cedars

He knew what this Voice could do. He had felt it. This was the Voice that snapped the cedars of Lebanon like dry reeds, that cut flames of fire loose from the sky, that shook the wilderness until the ground trembled and the wild does went into labor from fear. It was not one voice among many. It was the Voice, ha-kol, the same power that had come down on Sinai and left a whole nation flat on the sand, screaming for it to stop before it finished them.

That power was in the small room with him now, folded into a hand's width of air above the Ark, close enough to breathe on. And it did not break him. It did not split the boards or snuff the lamps or throw him against the far wall of cloth. It spoke to him quietly, the way a man speaks across a table to a friend.

The Sound Stopped at the Curtains

Outside, the camp heard nothing.

Six hundred thousand people were camped within a stone's throw of that Voice, and not one of them caught a single word. The sound rose to its full and terrible height inside the Tent, and then, at the line of the curtains, it stopped, as if the woven walls were the edge of creation itself. Aaron stood near the entrance. The elders stood in their ranks. Aaron's own sons stood in their priestly white. What reached their ears was wind moving over cloth, a child crying somewhere in the camp, a goat, the ordinary noise of a hundred thousand tents. Nothing more.

Long after, another man, the prophet Ezekiel, would hear the wings of the cherubim beating in a vision and mark how the sound carried only as far as the outer courtyard and no farther. This was narrower even than that. The Voice reached the curtains of the Tent and died there, sealed inside, meant for one set of ears.

The Circle Narrowed Until One Name Was Called

It could have gone out to all of them. It could have addressed the whole nation at once, the way it had at the mountain, or spoken to the seventy elders, or at least to Aaron and his sons who served an arm's length from the Ark. Instead it had said, long before, "I will meet with you there, and I will speak with you." With Moses. Not with them.

And it did not simply start talking. Before a word of instruction, the Voice called him by name, the way a person of decency does not speak to another until he has first called to him and been answered. "Moses, Moses," it said, twice, the doubled name it had used for Abraham at the altar, for Jacob going down into Egypt, for the boy Samuel in the dark of the sanctuary. A name said twice is love, and it is urgency. Then the Voice spoke, and between one matter and the next it left silences, gaps of quiet, so that a mortal man could turn each thing over in his mind before the next thing arrived.

The Stream That Poured Into a Single Ear

Where exactly did it come from, that Voice in the empty air? Generations later two sages stood over the question. Rabbi Akiva said it plainly. "From between the two cherubim." From that hand's breadth of shadow above the Ark cover, and nowhere else. Shimon ben Azai answered him carefully. "I am not rebutting my teacher," he said. "I am adding to his words." Does the Holy One not fill the heavens and the earth? He does. And yet He had pressed all of that immensity down into the narrow air over the Ark, between two hammered wings, for the sake of Israel.

No one alive could look full into that Glory and go on living. Only past the edge of death, the sages said, does a man so much as glimpse it, and not even the deathless angels who carry the Throne had ever seen it whole. And that same Glory now bent low over the Ark and spoke. The Voice came out of the mouth of the Holy One and ran into the ear of Moses like a stream poured straight from its spring, touching nothing on the way. The ministering angels were in the Tent. They stood and they watched, and the Voice was not for them. It thundered wondrously and it entered one ear as a whisper.

When it finished, Moses turned, lifted the screen, and walked back out into the plain daylight of the camp. He had heard what no other ear would ever hear. And he was the same man walking out that he had been walking in. Moses before the Voice, and Moses after it, with nothing in him swollen by the sound.