05/22/2026
https://jewishcurrents.org/parshah/may-21-2026
Shavuot Torah Reading
In the Torah’s description of the revelation at Mount Sinai, which we read this Shabbat in an interruption of the weekly parshah cycle due to the holiday of Shavuot, the experience of God’s presence is not one of bliss or comfort, but rather a terrifying theophany with annihilatory potential, the intensity of which overwhelms the Israelites. “All the people witnessed the thunder and lightning, the blare of the horn and the mountain smoking,” the Torah relates. “And when the people saw it, they fell back and stood at a distance. ‘You speak to us,’ they said to Moses, ‘and we will obey; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.’”
The Torah doesn’t tell us what was so terrifying to the people, but one reason for their fear might have been a unique sensory experience: The Hebrew phrase “witnessed thunder” could also be translated as “saw the voices,” or “saw the sounds.” Based on this detail, many commentators have suggested that a sense-bending synesthesia was an essential aspect of their experience of revelation. “They saw that which should be heard,” the medieval interpreter Rashi writes, “something that is impossible to see on any other occasion.” Shlomo Ephraim Luntschitz, a late-16th and early-17th century scholar often referred to by the name of his Torah commentary, the Kli Yakar, built on this interpretive tradition to emphasize the tangible nature of the revelation at Sinai, during which “each and every utterance that came from God immediately became materialized, and that utterance had so much substance that they saw all the letters in the air.”
This kind of mystical experience is far removed from our typical mode of consciousness. But if we take seriously the idea that revelation never ceased after Sinai, continuing each day anew (as the Rabbis of the Talmud insist), then what are we to make of this synesthesia? Does the ongoing nature of revelation mean that we encounter, or ought to encounter, this sort of synesthesia as well? These questions take on a particular urgency on Shavuot, which the Rabbis understand as the anniversary of the giving of the Torah, and therefore the holiday on which we read these verses—both commemorating and reenacting the revelation they describe. But if we are to properly commemorate and reenact Sinai, how can we understand, experience, and find meaning in the numinous synesthesia the Torah describes?
In his audacious, mystical rereading of this passage, the early 20th-century Hasidic commentator Kalonymus Kalman Shapira offers us one way of approaching the synesthesia of revelation. Based on the idea that holy speech makes visible the letters that compose it, Shapira writes: “This verse suggests that all the people were transformed into the supernal letters of God’s communication . . . That is, through the people themselves, Divine speech became visible.” For Shapira, the Israelites seeing the sounds of revelation means that they recognize each other as the incarnations of that revelation; they do not only experience the theophany, they become it. The eternal nature of the revelation at Sinai thus demands that we see ourselves and those around us as the ongoing, embodied expressions of God. This understanding has significant ethical and political consequences: Just as the Torah, as a vessel of revelation, is treated with the utmost respect, so too every human being demands the same care and dignity, as each of us is also a vessel of revelation. Through this interpretive lens, the synesthesia of the Israelites’ experience at Mount Sinai becomes both a peak mystical experience and a daily ethical demand, shaping our interpersonal commitments and demonstrating the sacred stakes of our interactions with the people around us—interactions that are no less religiously significant than the Biblical moment of God’s revelation.
Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.
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