For the sake of conciseness, I have phrased the title of this post to include two questions in one. The questions are:
1) Was there a revelation at Sinai?
2) If so, what was the nature of that revelation?
In my view, it is crucial that these questions (the first question in particular) are approached with an open mind. Assuming that our brains work well when used correctly,[1] this will give us the best chance of reaching the truth. If the answer is assumed from the outset and we only ask what the proof is, in all likelihood we will fail in intellectual honesty.[2]
Clearly, the difficulty in finding a decisive proof lies in the fact that we are not analysing an event that can be viewed with our own eyes. Science can prove the existence of things like the force of gravity and the heliocentricity of the galaxy empirically, through observation and extrapolation.[3] However, when it comes to establishing the veracity of historical events, we can only make judgements based on earlier testimonies. The longer ago these events were purported to have happened, the harder the task is.
Regarding our questions, we are at least helped by the fact that the Torah itself indicates how we are expected to convince future generations about its own accuracy. Thus a judgement regarding the strength of these arguments should be sufficient – if they are decisive then we know that the Torah is true; if not then there is a contradiction to the Divine nature of the Torah.
The mass revelation argument
The Torah tells us:
רַק הִשָּׁמֶר לְךָ וּשְׁמֹר נַפְשְׁךָ מְאֹד פֶּן תִּשְׁכַּח אֶת הַדְּבָרִים אֲשֶׁר רָאוּ עֵינֶיךָ וּפֶן יָסוּרוּ מִלְּבָבְךָ כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ וְהוֹדַעְתָּם לְבָנֶיךָ וְלִבְנֵי בָנֶיךָ: יוֹם אֲשֶׁר עָמַדְתָּ לִפְנֵי ה' אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ בְּחֹרֵב בֶּאֱמֹר ה' אֵלַי הַקְהֶל לִי אֶת הָעָם וְאַשְׁמִעֵם אֶת דְּבָרָי אֲשֶׁר יִלְמְדוּן לְיִרְאָה אֹתִי כָּל הַיָּמִים אֲשֶׁר הֵם חַיִּים עַל הָאֲדָמָה וְאֶת בְּנֵיהֶם יְלַמֵּדוּן.
דברים ד: ט-י
Just be careful and guard yourselves strongly, in case you forget the things that your eyes saw and they are removed from your heart for all the days of your lives - you must transmit them to your children and grandchildren. The day that you stood before Hashem your God at Chorev, when Hashem said to me "Assemble the nation and I will make my words heard to them, so that they will learn to fear Me for all the days that they live on Earth and teach their children."
Devarim 4:9-10
The clear implication is that just as it is critical for the generation who received the Torah to remember the event, it is also critical for subsequent generations to hear testimony of it. If the tradition were to be lost, the Torah would not survive.[4] It seems that hearing about what happened is supposed to convince us – we need to examine the strength of this argument.
We first need to state the obvious. If I had a family tradition that an ancestor 20 generations back was a prophet and that God had told him that all his descendants should be vegetarians, I wouldn't buy it. The whole story could have been made up at various points along the way, and even if I knew that the family had kept this tradition this could be put down to naivety.
It is also clear to me that the Torah cannot be written off with the same ease. Were the whole event never to have happened, this would have required one of two things. Either an entire nation (of 600,000 men plus women and children) would have had to have experienced a hallucination which appeared like God spoke to them, or someone in a subsequent generation would have had to persuade an entire nation that such an event really happened.[5]
I think most would agree that the first of these possibilities can be discounted.[6] The second possibility also seems implausible to me, although here there are countless variations that would need to be eliminated. If we are to be honest with ourselves, it is hard to be 100% sure that this could not have happened.
However, I have already written before that we don't need to be 100% sure and that it is impossible for a human being to be 100% sure about anything. The highest level that we can get to is the elimination of reasonable doubt (see Obligations of the mind). Without getting into any alternative theories about how the tradition may have developed falsely, I do not believe that they are reasonable.
Is this enough?
Are all those who fail to reach the conclusion above irrational? I have often heard the claim that atheists and other non-believers find themselves unable to accept the truth of the Torah due to the obligations that this would lead to. They are thus blinded by the yetzer hara. While I do not reject this argument entirely, it is far too simplistic. There are many non-believers who hold themselves to high standards of morality, and among other religions who don't accept the Torah there are also those who choose lifestyles that are far from self-gratifying.
I believe that many of the rational thinkers who reject the Torah do so because of a counterargument that they feel is stronger than the mass revelation argument. While it may not be particularly reasonable to believe that the whole story of the giving of the Torah was made up, many believe that it is even less reasonable for it to actually have happened as described in the Torah! We have never seen such a supernatural event, so how can we accept so easily that things were so different 2,000 years ago?
While I do not agree with this counter-argument, it is not something that we can ignore. We must recognise that the strength of the mass revelation argument cannot stand alone – it is worthless if we cannot also explain why what happened at Sinai is plausible. This is no small task, and here I will just provide an outline of how I believe this should be done.
We must first establish that God exists, without using the Torah as a proof (see Obligations of the mind, in particular footnote 17). If there is a God, intuitively He would want us to act in a moral way.[7] It would therefore make sense for Him to communicate to us how this should be done, and to do so in an unambiguous way.[8] This was done at Sinai.
The final thing we must show is that the content of the Torah makes sense. It would not seem reasonable to claim that God gave us an incoherent set of commandments with no particular reason.[9] This is the longest part of the job, and is part of what we are supposed to be doing when we learn Torah.
What exactly happened?
Provided that the process above is completed successfully, we can move on to asking what exactly the tradition passed down through the generations says happened at Sinai. The pesukim indicate that Hashem spoke to all of us, but subsequently the people were scared and went back on the request, preferring to hear from Moshe.[10] However, how to interpret this is that this is a subject of some dispute.
Chazal famously tell us that the nation only heard the first two commandments directly from Hashem, at which point their souls departed and they requested that only Moshe should hear the remainder.[11] The implication is that the first two commandments were heard clearly by everyone, and this is the explicit view of R' Yehuda HaLevi.[12]
The Rambam disagrees, inferring from pesukim and from the words of Chazal elsewhere that while Hashem spoke to Moshe, the rest of the nation only heard a general sound but were not able to decipher the words. He understands that the idea of the whole nation hearing the first two commandments is a lone view in Chazal, and that even according to this view the nation did not hear on the same level as Moshe heard.[13] Elsewhere the Rambam writes that the nation did hear Hashem calling Moshe by name, and that this was enough to prove to them that Moshe was Hashem's prophet and that the rest of the Torah was Divine.[14]
Clearly then there is no unified tradition as to exactly what happened at Sinai, and the mass revelation argument can only support the common denominator between the different views. This common denominator is that Hashem spoke in a way that was enough to convince an entire nation that He was indeed speaking to Moshe, giving him the authority to teach us the Torah. For most practical purposes, this is all we really need to know.[15]
[1] This is an axiom that we cannot prove, but we also cannot function without. Were it not to be true, there would be no point in any study or intellectual pursuit.
[2] Even if this route leads to the correct conclusion, it is hard to see any value in such a blind faith (see Obligations of the mind). While every one of us will naturally approach questions like these with pre-conceived notions that have been shaped by our upbringing, all that can be expected of us is to do our best.
[3] These methods are not infallible, as they rely on assumptions that what is true in one place or time is true everywhere and at all times. There are often factors which are insignificant in most cases and thus remain unknown for long periods of time – a classic example is Einstein's Theory of Relativity. However, for theories established empirically and universally accepted to later be discredited entirely is to my knowledge unheard of.
[4] The Ramban counts the warning against forgetting what happened at Sinai as negative commandment (no. 2 in his list of negative mitzvos 'forgotten' by the Rambam).
[5] Even if such a tradition started with one person lying to his children, at some point an entire nation would have had to have been convinced of its truth, without a significant number of doubters.
[6] It is worth mentioning that not only would the giving of the Torah have to have been imagined; so would all the events of the Exodus and the desert. However, the Rambam writes that wondrous events alone are not enough of a basis for our beliefs and it was necessary for Hashem to speak to us directly (Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah 8:1-3). According to him, the mitzvah of remembering what happened in Egypt is in order to strengthen our belief in reward and punishment (Moreh Nevuchim 3:41). While the Ramban gives a greater weight to the memory of Egypt (Shemos 13:16), he agrees that remembering what happened as Sinai is also crucial (see footnote 4 above).
[7] This may not be simple to prove philosophically, but it is an almost universal assumption.
[8] This is far from obvious, but in order to support the mass revelation argument we only need to show that it is reasonable.
[9] See Torah and Morals
[11] See Makos 24a; Shir HaShirim Rabbah, Parsha 6
[12] Kuzari 1:87
[13] Moreh Nevuchim 2:33
[14] Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah 8:1
[15] There are still several outstanding issues, such as parts of the Torah which are not unanimously agreed to have been taught directly to Moshe (such as the last eight pesukim). We also need to develop the argument further to explain how we know if the words of subsequent prophets are true.
