Yitro 5773: God Doesn't Have an Address

This week's parashah / Torah portion includes one of our people's defining moments:  the revelation at Mount Sinai.

With a real sense of the dramatic, the Torah describes this moment:
"Now Mount Sinai smoked all over, since Adonay had come down upon it in fire; its smoke went up like the smoke of a furnace, and all of the mountain trembled exceedingly.  Now the shofar sound was growing exceedingly stronger--Moshe kept speaking, and God kept answering him in the sound." (Sh'mot/Exodus 19:18-19)

I've often tried to imagine what it was like to stand at the bottom of that mountain, hear what our ancestors heard, see what our ancestors saw.  It must have been overwhelming to all the senses . . . intense and awe-filled.

In the summer of 1979, I had the opportunity to travel to the site referred to today as Mount Sinai.  Even though I was engaged as one of four counselors leading 80 teenagers through the Sinai desert, I still had the time to pick up my head and look where we were:  a vast, stark, unchanging landscape.  Not a vestige of fire and smoke, not a hint of thunder, shofar and the voice of God.  The stage was empty.  My surroundings conspired to teach me the limitations of my mortality.

Today the mountain referred to in the travel books as Mount Sinai (the site of the the Santa Katarina Monastery) is indistinguishable from the surrounding mountains in the Sinai wilderness.  If ever the pyrotechnics described in Sh'mot/Exodus did take place on that mountain, if ever God's voice was somehow sensed by the Israelite former slaves huddled at the foot of the mountain, there is no perceptible trace today.  Mount Sinai looks like any other height in that neighborhood of awe-inspiring, beautifully tinted hills.

What a perfect setting for God's definitive collective revelation to an entire people.  The message of that venue is that there is not one locale to which we must return in order to receive God's message to us.  We don't really know which height was the height of Sinai.  There is no trace because we should not be able to trace a path back to that place.  God met us, as a people, in the middle of nowhere because God can be accessible to us in the middle of anywhere.

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