Afraid to be Loved
“Go near and hear all that the Lord our God says; then speak to us all that the Lord our God speaks to you, and we will hear and do it.” Deuteronomy 5:27 NASB
Speak to us– Israel stands at the mountain of God. The whole territory shakes. Lightning. Thunder. Thick darkness. And the voices. Yes, that’s right, it is plural—Exodus 20:18, “All the people saw the voices and lightning.” And yes, I know that it is translated, “perceived the thunder,” but that’s because the translators want to make sense of the Hebrew for English readers. The Hebrew is qôlot, literally, the plural of qôl, a word that means, “voice, sound, noise.” As TWOT notes, this word “primarily signifies a sound produced by the vocal cords (actual or figurative).”[1] And yes, it doesn’t make sense to say that they saw the qôlot, but when did you expect the text about God to make sense?
So the people saw the voices—and it scared them to death. But they immediately recognize the paradox. They have seen the voices and yet they live! They have encountered transcendence and have not died. That is reason enough to praise God, but that isn’t what they do. God presents them with undiluted life—His own presence, His “voices.” But they are afraid. Why? “It is almost as if it is life, and not death, that they fear.”[2] “To hear the voice of God is to suffer the unbearable; to receive the Torah is to return to life, to one’s recognizable self.”[3] And along with that recognition, that awareness of life and self, comes responsibility—the requirement to respond to God’s voices, to the individual attunement of God’s demand on each one of us. In other words, it is not God that the people fear. It is the fact that in His presence they perceive what they must become as a result of who He is. They are under the demand to be fully human, to accept the Torah as the means of regaining their true humanity. And that is just too much to bear!
It is so much easier to just get along, to just go along, to not press for the truth of authentic existence, to blend into the world’s view of what you should be. In this sense, “God’s gift of the Torah is no gift . . . but a loan. That means responsibility: who will be able to stand at the time of repayment?”[4] The gift of life entails a debt, a debt that must be repaid. As Luzzatto wrote, this gift carries with it an infinite debt since it is the gift that constitutes who we are as existing persons. Who can repay such a debt? It will take all of you, all your life, to repay what God has given. And for most of us, it is much too much to bear.
So we ask someone else to do the job for us, to act as the intermediary, to filter God’s voices so that we don’t have to stand in the presence of transcendent demand. As Zornberg notes: “They run from an intensity of life, from the words of the living God.”[5] When they ask Moses to stand between them and God, they basically refuse God’s offer to immediacy. They refuse the risk of obligation. They fear the goodness of God and prefer somnambulism (yes, I know, you will have to look it up). They fear being loved.
Wouldn’t you?
Topical Index: qôlot, voices,speak to us, Exodus 20:18, Deuteronomy 5:27
[1]Coppes, L. J. (1999). 1998 קול. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament(electronic ed., p. 792). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture, p. 266.
