Did G-d really speak to the Jewish people at Mt. Sinai? Did He really give them the Torah? Secular intellectuals often like to interpret events in light of their own experience and knowledge. Since G-d never spoke to them, they deny that G-d could have spoken to anyone else.

Many arrogantly dismiss the Bible and Jewish tradition altogether – a convenient move if you don”t want to keep the mitzvos. Some, however, are willing to concede that something happened at Mt. Sinai and that the prophets of the Bible weren”t on drugs.

One popular theory is that these people heard a voice in their own heads. In other words, they worked themselves into a state of such spiritual rapture that they began hearing a voice in their brain which they took to be divine. So much of the Torah we have today is simply a product of these people”s spiritual “trips,” they argue.

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch rails against this characterization numerous times in his commentary on Chumash. G-d”s voice came to the Jewish from without, not within, he writes. That”s why, for example, the Jewish people could not approach Mt. Sinai – on penalty of death – while the Torah was being given. The distinction between the Giver of the Torah and the receiver of the Torah had to be clear and absolute.

That”s also why Jewish prophets had to be sound of mind and body. If a desperately hungry and weak person has a vision, he might be hallucinating. It”s much harder to make that case if he”s healthy and strong.

And that”s also why the menorah had to be lit “outside the dividing curtain that is in front of the Testimony” (Shemos 27:21). Writes Rav Hirsch: “The human mind, turning towards the Torah and receiving enlightenment from the Torah [symbolized by the lighting of the menorah], has constantly to be kept conscious that it stands michutz, outside the Torah. The Torah is something that has been given to it, not produced by it.

“It has to draw and increase its knowledge and enlightenment out of the Torah, but never to take its own light into the realm of the Torah to alter or reform it.”

For the Torah is not ours to reform. It did not emerge from our own spiritual imagination. It was given to us from G-d who exists independently of both us and the world.

Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch”s commentary on Chumash.
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