Shavuot Second Day 5775

Did you ever see sounds or noises? I ask because in Sinai, when the Torah was given, on this very date… well, yesterday actually… it says that “all the people see the voices”. And because we were all there according to tradition, so yes, we all saw voices, we all saw noises and sounds. And yes I am sure it was awesome. And yes, because of that moment we still study Torah and try to find all of its secrets and meanings, we look on it the Divine Truth that we heard today before so many years. There is something inside us that still remembers, because it was such a wonderful experience. It was a experience of being an echo, a resonance box. The experience of the echo we all know! Because when it happens we want more of it, we will go very far in order to experience that echo. Every time a person packs a suitcase to go in a journey, he or she goes looking for that covenant of the echo engraved on his heart. That’s what happened to Elijah the Prophet. After the violent and noisy drama in the Carmel Mount in his conflict against the prophets of Baal, after this he fell on a deep depression. On that event in the Carmel he raised so much the emotional “volume” of his and the crowd with him, that the resonance box in his heart can’t get excited anymore with just routine, a few drops of rain that fell after years of drought (DRAUT). Therefore his G’d knew that he had to go back to Sinai! He remembered that there he experienced last time that perfect echo, that the Divine voice and the human heart connected in the most intimate dialogue that ever happened between heaven and earth. So intimate, that they felt they were seeing the voices. With his last strength Elijah crawled to Mount Sinai. There G’d offered him an educational corrective workshop. He showed Elijah the most dramatic voices of nature: fire, wind, storm, and earthquake. However, said G’d to Elijah, not in the earthquake is G’d. The Divine voice is on the quiet voice, kol dmama daka, and that’s the secret of the echo. The noisy-quiet experience that Elijah had in Sinai, all the people of Israel experienced during the giving of the Torah. It is not a coincidence that this is the most defining moment on the collective human consciousness, not only that of the Jews. There is a reason that the Bible is the best and most sold book in the World, there is a reason that it is said that we all were in Sinai, because inside all of us there is that echo, the echo that does not stop to whisper quietly. The voice that when we manage to hear it above all the noise of our lives, we feel our hearts beating again. Moshe our Master knew this and therefore and the end of his life, at the end of the Torah, looked for a way for the Torah to survive in the echoes of our heart every day. And he found it, a song. The last public act of Moses was to teach a song to the people, because there is no better way to make an echo that singing. However, Moses was not that good singing, as we know he had a speech disability and therefore he only spoke. Also speech can make an echo! A big big echo! But there is nothing like a good song, that magic encounter between words and melody, between music and voice, between text and intention, to create that echo that our hearts so much desire. This Shavuot and well, during the rest of our lives, we will search for the melody, we will search for the words, we will search for the mix of words and melody in order that the big and quiet truth (because real truth is always quiet), in order for that truth to echo inside us, to tune the strings of our heart. And when that happens we will think incorrectly that it is us, but no. We are only the resonance box. Let’s try to see the voices.