ByMICHAEL M. COHEN
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Shavuot is the celebration of the revelation of the Torah. Since that moment when it was given to the Jewish people, matan torah, its words and letters – including the spaces on the Torah scroll – have been open to interpretation. When we think of commentaries that help us comprehend the multilayers and multidimensions of meaning in the Torah, we think of the rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash, not to mention Ibn Ezra, Rashi, Ramban, Sforno, Hirsch, Nechama Leibowitz, Shlomo Riskin, Aviva Zornberg and Jonathan Sacks, to name a few. While all are important, there are other forms of commentary that use the other side of the brain.

The arts can also be a form of commentary. 
One way I teach is by taking a biblical scene and finding a number of paintings, sculptures, or drawings to see how different artists “interpret” the text through the artwork they produce. For example, there is one theory that Michelangelo painted the robe surrounding God in the “Creation of Adam’’ in the Sistine Chapel as a silhouette of the human brain. In this way, Michelangelo represents God as pure thought or reason. Lyrics in modern and contemporary songs can be another example of biblical “commentary.” Leonard Cohen’s “You Want It Darker” is a haunting and profound interpretation of the biblical word heneni (here I am).
MOVIES, TOO, can be a form of commentary/interpretation. When it comes to the revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai, we have Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments and Stephen Spielberg’s The Prince of Egypt. The question both DeMille and Speilberg faced is who would do the voice of God, which in and of itself is a question of interpretation. DeMille shot some of the movie at the mountain of Santa Caterina in the Sinai Desert in 1955, a year before the Sinai War. At the monastery at the base of the mountain after a day of filming God’s revelation at the Burning Bush, Charlton Heston (who played Moses), DeMille and the abbot of the monastery had dinner together. Heston remembers:

“Mr. DeMille,” I said. “When we were filming that today, I was trying to imagine God’s voice.” (We were to record that back in the studio.) “Surely I hear Him inside my own head, my own heart. I think it should be my voice, too.” The abbot sipped his wine and nodded thoughtfully. DeMille smiled. “We’ll have to think about that. You already have a pretty good part, you know. It’s possible, though. It might work.” Some months later, that’s the way we did it. I never really heard God on the mountain. But I found Moses there.

Heston’s insight about the voice of God and Moses is also found in the Talmud! The question is raised over the sentence, “As Moses spoke God answered him in a voice” (Exodus 19:19) describing the encounter between Moses and God on Mt. Sinai. In Brachot 45a we read:

As it is stated: “Moses spoke, and God responded in a voice” (Exodus 19:19). This verse requires further consideration, as there is no need for the verse to state ‘in a voice’ since we know that God spoke in a voice so the phrase ‘in a voice’ adds nothing. Rather, to what purpose did the verse state ‘in a voice’ ? In Moses’ voice. That is to say, since voice meaning the voice of God is redundant it must be teaching something else. In this case God spoke in the voice of Moses so Moses could better understand.

As with all great communicators, God “speaks” in the language of those with whom they are speaking to so they can be better understood. George Bernard Shaw said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” That is to say, just because words have been exchanged is no guarantee that the speaker will be fully understood by the person they are speaking to. Both the speaker and the listener make assumptions about the meaning of the words exchanged; when those assumptions don’t line up, misunderstandings easily develop. This is even more so when it comes to God communicating with humans. A midrash makes the point that at Mt. Sinai, God fine-tuned His messaging by speaking in countless voices so God’s commandments could be comprehended by all the Children of Israel:

Come and see how the voice would go out among all of Israel – each and every one according to their capacity: the elders according to their capacity; the young men according to their capacity; the infants according to their capacity; the sucklings according to their capacity; the women according to their capacity; and even Moshe according to his capacity. (Shemot Rabbah 5:9)

RELATED, SPIELBERG’S original idea was for the voice of God to “be represented by a myriad of voices’’ according to Val Kilmer, who, in the end, did the voices for both Moses and God. Kilmer recounts it was “a wonderful idea, but it didn’t work dramatically. It sounded unpleasant. So they came back to the very solid theological idea that God comes to you in a voice that you can hear or comprehend. So they asked me to go back and record the voice of God.” Kilmer adds, “It’s not exactly the voice of Moses, but it’s a familiar sound to him. I loved that idea.”

The revelation at Mount Sinai of the Torah remains a mystery as to what exactly happened and what exactly was heard. Still: at the end of the day, we are fortunate in that we can have before us a handwritten Torah scroll and/or a chumash, the printed version of the Five Books of Moses, as well as a table full of commentaries. Rabbi Louis Finkelstein taught, “When I pray, I speak to God, when I study, God speaks to me.”

That is a conversation worth engaging in and listening to.

The writer is rabbi emeritus of the Israel Congregation, Manchester Center, Vermont, and a faculty member of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and Bennington College.