130 cosmos
belief in the revelation of Torah at Mount Sinai. Traditionally, this is sometimes
taken to mean that God actually dictated the entire Five Books of Moses—all
304,805 Hebrew letters from Genesis through Deuteronomy! But problems
immediately arise: for example, how could God have dictated to Moses the final
verses of Deuteronomy, which describe Moses’s own death? For that matter,
how could God have dictated at Sinai the accounts of Israel’s wandering in the
desert over the next forty years. Well, according to one authority, Moses received
the revelation “scroll by scroll,” that is, section by section, as the Children of
Israel wandered through the desert. Further, he wrote the account of his own
death with tears in his eyes.
Fine, but what words did God actually speak at Mount Sinai? How much
of the Torah was heard directly by the people assembled at the foot of the
mountain? Was it the Ten Commandments? If we look closely, we see that only
the first two are written in the first person: “I amYHVHyour God....Donot
have any other gods before Me.” The remaining eight commands are in the
second person: You shall do this; You shall not do that. Perhaps only these first
two were spoken directly by God, while Moses conveyed the rest.
Or did God speak just the first command, or just the first word? A later,
mystical view goes even further: God spoke only the first letter of the Ten
Commandments: thealefofAnokhi,“I am.” Now, analefwithout a vowel has
no sound; it simply represents a glottal stop—the position taken by the larynx
in preparation for speech. So, according to this view, revelation consists of pure
potential, with no specific content spelled out. The written text of the Torah is
already a commentary on thealef,a human interpretation. It would be difficult
to imagine a more radical transformation of the dogma of revelation.
Let’s look at one other example of how a traditional notion is expanded,
or exploded. I am thinking of the image of God as “Father in Heaven.” This
image pervades traditional religious texts and the liturgy—so much so that it
is difficult for most people to even picture God otherwise. Yet, over four hun-
dred years ago, a learned rabbinic scholar and mystic named Moses Cordovero
challenged this notion, contrasting such naı ̈ve belief with one that is more
sophisticated and boundless. Here is what he writes:
An impoverished person thinks that God is an old man with white
hair, sitting on a wondrous throne of fire that glitters with countless
sparks, as the Bible states (Daniel 7:9): “The Ancient-of-Days sits,
the hair on his head like clean fleece, his throne—flames of fire.”
Imagining this and similar fantasies, the fool corporealizes God. He
falls into one of the traps that destroy faith. His awe of God is lim-
ited by his imagination.But if you are enlightened, you know God’s oneness; you know that
the divine is devoid of bodily categories—these can never be applied