Parashat Yitro | Rabbi Roly Matalon | February 7, 2026

Three months after leaving Egypt,

the Israelites arrive at the foot of

Mount Si.

They come exhilarated

by the miraculous rescue at the sea, but

still bearing the imprint of slavery.

Fearful,

confused, unsteady,

unaccustomed to freedom,

and wholly unprepared for

responsibility.

As the saying goes,

they are out of Egypt, but Egypt is not

yet out of them.

They have liberated from slavery,

but they have not yet come into purpose.

And it is precisely there

in that in between place

that God chooses to reveal Godself.

It could have been a gentle, calm,

comforting revelation.

God may have spoken with Moshe and the

people

in a sweet, pleasant,

reassuring voice

in the spirit of Ash.

Let me hear your voice for your voice is

sweet and your face is comely.

The revelation

however did not happen

in a sweet voice but in a roar.

The revelation at Sinai was overwhelming

and terrifying.

The Torah describes the scene in

language meant to overwhelm the senses.

Thunder cracking across the sky,

lightning splitting the darkness,

a dense cloud descending upon the

mountain, the blast of the chauffar

growing louder and louder until the

people trembled.

The mountain the mountain quakdm

rose like the smoke of a kil.

Moshe spoke

and God answered him in thunder.

In the Talmud, Shabbat 88b, the rabbis

imagine revelation at Sinai

as an encounter of an unbearable force.

With each divine utterance, the souls of

the Israelites left their bodies. The

human frame could not withstand the

power of God's voice.

They cite the verse from the Song of

Songs. My soul

departed as he spoke,

not as a metaphor of poetic longing,

but as a description of spiritual sa

shattering.

Revelation in this telling exceeded

the limits of human endurance.

And yet the people continued to receive

the commandments. The midrash teach us

that after each utterance

God revived them with the same due that

in the future will resurrect the dead.

Revelation thus becomes a cycle of

collapse and renewal. The people fall

under the force of God's word and God

restores them so that they may hear the

next word. Another midrash inima quoted

by Rashi

tells that each time God spoke the

people recoiled in fear retreating 12

miles from the mountain.

The divine voice did not simply

overwhelm them. It pushed them back.

And so the ministering angels came and

helped them move forward again,

returning them to the foot of the

mountain so they could receive the next

word.

The angels bring back the fearful and

trembling people back to the message God

wants them to hear.

These images portray revelation

not as a serene or comforting moment

but as a state of profound spiritual

turmoil.

The people yearn for God's word and at

the same time cannot bear it.

They move forward and are driven back.

They die and are revived.

Revelation is depicted as an experience

in which the people are repeatedly

shattered and restored.

The rabbis in Brahot 22a say that the

revelation at Sinai happened

in terror fear quaking and trembling.

Why such terror?

Why must revelation come with trembling,

with death and revival, with fear so

profound

that the people refuse to hear God's

voice directly

and plead with Moshe

to mediate God's voice for them.

Part of the answer

lies in the nature of revelation itself.

Revelation is not merely an external

event.

something that happens out there.

It is also an internal confrontation.

As Aviva Zornberg writes,

"Those who are called on to respond to

God's voice,

are most shaken

by what is revealed within themselves."

Revelation, she suggests,

has come at us from the outside.

But its terror

is what it has generated within us.

Standing at Sinai means standing

exposed,

open, vulnerable, without offenses.

The divine voice does not simply address

the people. It reverberates through

them, shaking them from within.

It penetrates

into the hidden corners of their fears

and doubts.

their vulnerabilities and their

aspirations.

Most of all, it exposes the gap between

who they are and who they are called to

become.

Revelation becomes a mirror

and to encounter oneself in a spiritual

and moral mirror

can be deeply frightening

in that sense. Then the terror of Sinai

is not only the terror of God's

overwhelming presence.

It is the terror of self-recognition.

The casidic masters express this idea in

a powerful way.

The fat teaches that the voice at Sinai

was not primarily external. It was the

awakening of the divine voice planted

already

within each soul.

Revelation did not give the people

something new. It uncovered

what had been hidden within them.

And that is precisely why they trembled.

To hear God's voice arising from within

is to hear the truth of one's own

predicament

as well as one's own potential

and the distance between who we are and

who we are called to become.

Sinai is terrifying

because it reveals us to ourselves

and how far we still are

from who we are called to be.

Since returning from Israel last week

after our BJ visit, Alicia and I and 45

BJ members, many of whom are here this

morning,

I have been thinking about this kind of

revelation.

The kind of revelation that comes not as

comfort

but as confrontation.

We stood in places where people and the

land itself

still hold a memory of terror.

We stood at Kibus Berry

at the site of the Mo Nova massacre. We

saw the burned and destroyed homes.

Everyday objects left in the dirt. The

photographs of those who were murdered

or taken captive, hundreds and hundreds

of them. We listen to survivors whose

voices still carry the deep terror of

October 7.

We felt the weight of a trauma that is

not past but still present, not healed

but still raw.

And then on Friday morning in Jerusalem,

Felicia referred this to this last

night. We spoke with young reservists

who fought in Gaza,

three of them.

They told us quietly

and painfully

and without one ounce of anger that what

they had witnessed shook them in a

different way. Not only the brutality of

Hamas,

but the ways in which some of their

fellow soldiers and officers acted in

ways that violated the values they

believed the Jewish state was meant to

embody.

They spoke with deep sorrow,

with disillusionment, and with a kind of

moral loneliness.

We met others too in our trip. Israeli

Jews insisting that Judaism and its

values of decency, human dignity,

justice, and equality still mean

something in this moment.

And Palestinians who refuse to surrender

their humanity

even as the world around them un

unravels. People

on both sides swimming against the moral

and political current, insisting

on the possibility of human decency

in impossible times.

We were standing

at a kind of Sinai.

We felt ima

and z the terror

the fear the quaking the trembling.

We felt the power of people shaking but

what is revealed within themselves and

within the state the self confrontation

the confrontation with God's

internalized voice with truth.

And that confrontation produced in me

and I believe in many in our group a

profound sense of hope.

And in our last few days in Israel, we

heard

our hearts as we heard what was going on

here. We our hearts were also in

Minneapolis.

We saw the disturbing images and videos

that were being widely reported. Masked

federal agents deployed in American

streets,

dressed as if headed into combat,

rampaging through neighborhoods,

intimidating and assaulting ordinary

residents, detaining people arbitrarily

and sowing fear.

Masked

a stark manifestation of the abuse of

power. We saw the footage of the

horrific murder of Alec P. Alex Prey, a

kind and compassionate man who came to

someone else's aid

and who was labeled by our government a

domestic terrorist.

We saw the terror and the recoiling.

And we also saw something else. We saw

neighbors forming networks of

protection. We saw people delivering

meals to those afraid to leave their

homes. We saw volunteers walking

children to school, accompanying elders

to doctor's appointments, standing guard

against homes targeted by ICE agents.

We saw a community refusing to surrender

its humanity and dignity.

It was another Sinai where terror and

moral truth

stood side by side revealing not only

how far we are from whom we ought to be

but also the possibility of who we might

yet become as a nation.

Israel and the Jewish people are

struggling with our own soul

and so is our country.

Amid it all, there is a voice calling us

back to ourselves

to remember who we can be to confront

who we are and who we are called to

become.

At the moment of revelation, we see

ourselves not as we wish to be, not as

we pretend to be, but as we are.

Fearful, fragile,

capable of terrible harm, and at the

same time capable of courage, of

compassion, capable of extraordinary

moral imagination.

Revelation is the mirror we spend our

lives avoiding.

It is the moment when truth

becomes unavoidable.

And if there is hope at Sinai,

it is not the hope of reassurance,

but the hope that having been shaken,

we might yet choose to listen, to face

ourselves, and to respond.

Shabbat shalom.