"And Moses took out the people to meet God" (Exodus 19:17) — and Rabbi Yossi recalls how Rabbi Yehudah used to interpret the verse from (Deuteronomy 33:2): "And he said: The Lord came from Sinai." Rabbi Yehudah would read this not as "from Sinai" but as "to Sinai" — that is, God came to Sinai specifically to give the Torah to Israel. The mountain was not God's home. It was His destination, chosen solely for this encounter.
But Rabbi Yossi disagrees. He insists on the plain reading: "The Lord came from Sinai." God came from the mountain to receive Israel — like a groom who goes out to receive his bride.
This image is extraordinary. In a Jewish wedding, the groom does not wait passively for the bride to arrive. He goes out to greet her, to welcome her, to escort her into the new life they will share. Rabbi Yossi applies this exact dynamic to the revelation at Sinai. God did not sit atop the mountain and summon Israel to climb. He came out from the mountain to meet them. The Creator went toward His people.
The Torah-giving, in this reading, was a wedding. God was the groom. Israel was the bride. The Torah was the marriage contract (ketubah). And the mountain was the wedding canopy (chuppah) under which the covenant was sealed. Moses's role in "taking out the people" was that of the attendant who leads the bride to the ceremony.
This is why later Jewish tradition came to view Sinai as the moment of betrothal between God and Israel — a covenant of love, not merely of law. The groom came out to meet the bride, and the world was never the same.