(Delivered February 15, 2025)

Shabbat shalom! 

In the past several months, many people in my world—family members, fellow students, activists I know, and also (a little bit) me—have been dealing with a prolonged sense of overwhelm. We live in a complicated, overstimulating world, moving at a kind of hyper-speed pace. We are overscheduled, under-rested, and subject to constant bombardment in an ever shortening news cycle. Chaos has become the governing esthetic. Information, much of which barely counts as informative, is growing noisier all the time. Over and over, we get simultaneously drawn in deep and sidetracked by the volume—in both senses of the word—of what comes at us. Catastrophes both natural and human-caused are swirling all around us, and technology has made disconnecting from both bad news and our daily obligations harder and harder. 

All this played in my mind when I read the parsha this week, especially as I reflected on the Israelites’ response to their momentous first direct encounter with the divine. As Moses works to ready everybody, he assembles the elders of the community and gives them the message that God has instructed him to relay: that God is offering to take on the Israelites as a treasured people, a people that can become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, if only they can fulfill God’s mitzvot. 

וַיַּעֲנוּ כל־הָעָם יַחְדָּו וַיֹּאמְרוּ כֹּל אֲשֶׁר־דִּבֶּר יי נַעֲשֶׂה
And all the people answered together,
saying, “We will do all that God says.”

The elders’ eager response is telling. When the experience is new and enticing, when there is the prospect of a reward—in the form of becoming God’s special treasure—the Israelites are all in. Full of the ambition and desire to please the Holy One, they answer, as Cassuto puts it:

בְּלֵב אֶחַד וּבְנֶפֶש אַחַת
With one heart and one soul

In this moment, divine favor seems clear and attainable, so the Israelites have an easy time rallying around their task. They readily accept the teachings of the Torah, sight unseen.

Then… things get weird. The moment of God’s revelation turns out to be intense, breathtaking, and, yes, overwhelming. With thunder, lightning, and smoke, the sheer sensations of God’s presence are shattering. Maybe there’s an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, or maybe it just feels that way. Whatever the logical explanation may be, the cumulative effect of all that divinity is sensory overload. As the magnitude of God’s presence comes into focus, the Israelites realize they are going to have to filter their experience. The נַעֲשֶׂה of the previous chapter is transformed, and they say to Moses: 

דַּבֵּר־אַתָּה עִמָּנוּ וְנִשְׁמָעָה וְאַל־יְדַבֵּר עִמָּנוּ אֱלֹהִים פֶּן־נָמוּת׃
You speak to us and we’ll do it,
but don’t let God speak to us again, or we will die.

Overpowered by what they encounter at Mount Sinai, the Israelites pump the brakes. They still want to receive the teachings of the Torah, and they are still committed to fulfilling them, but they wisely come to understand it’s going to be much more challenging than they expected, and they’re going to need to funnel the experience so they can take it in.  

This change of heart is so very human. Sometimes the prospect of something seems manageable but the reality of it is much harder than we thought it would be. 

And if something as amazing as being in the presence of the divine causes us to back away, how much more must we need to back away from, say, a complicated media environment or relentless political incitements. This is, of course, not the same thing, but the model of the Israelites in the Torah can teach us something about ourselves, and about what it is to be human. 

In a way, the Israelites’ desire to titrate their encounter with God is a sign of maturity, an admission that we humans can’t do everything all the time. As the Emek Davar puts it, they realize:

לֹא הרְבָּה אֶפְשָר לַהֶם לִהִיוֹת בְּהַכַנָה רָבָה כַּזוֹ 
שֶהָיָה בְּשָעָת עַשֶרֶת הַדִּבְּרוֹת
It is not possible for them to be ready in the same way
as they were at the moment of the ten commandments.

All this religious revelation takes a lot out of them, and they come to see that if they are really going to fulfill their commitments they will need to take a more measured pace. It isn’t just fear of the thunder and lightning, as Chizkuni interprets, but rather that the gestalt of God’s presence and the obligations it imposes on the Israelites add a kind of gravity that defies defying.

Likewise, when the demands of life threaten to drown us—whether that’s being a new parent or holding steady in a complicated world—it’s worthwhile to remind ourselves that we don’t have to do everything all the time. We don’t have to have a perfectly clean house, or read every article, or respond to every provocation. 

Indeed our Haftarah today offers a holy antidote to the rigidity and overambition of the Israelites’ initial response. In the opening few verses, Isaiah describes the angels in attendance to God. His description is familiar from the kedusha, the prayer of holiness we recite each morning:

וְקָרָא זֶה אֶל־זֶה וְאָמַר 
קָדוֹשׁ  קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ 
יי צְבָאוֹת 
מְלֹא כל־הָאָרֶץ כְּבוֹדוֹ׃
And they called, one to another saying: Holy, holy, holy
is the God of creation, the whole world is filled with God’s glory.

Whereas the Israelites at first, over-ambitiously muster themselves to speak יַחְדָּו—together as one, the angels call out to one another, and speak in dialogue, which we imitate when we pray it. This back-and-forth gives us a רֶמֶז—a hint—of how we might handle our moments of overload. By being in dialogue, sharing the load; by calling out to one another; and by drawing our attention to the holiness that is with us, to the glory that fills this beautiful world, we can rest in the moment, even as it overwhelms. 

Shabbat shalom!