When do you take a public conversation private? On the one hand, if you want people to trust you, shouldn’t the conversation continue in the presence of others? Perhaps not. Sometimes, the right thing to do is to make the conversation private because there is more to gain in private.
I am thinking about a topic that is discussed in this week’s Torah portion. The Torah tells us that when G-d wanted to talk to Moses, He would appear at the tent of meeting and His voice would be heard by Moses only – even Aaron could not hear His voice, if he were present. The commentators point out that this was in fact a miracle.
The question that jumps right out at us is: Why the need for the miracle? Wouldn’t it have been better if “the voice of G-d” could have continued for all to hear? OK, maybe not for everyone to hear, as that might have been too much to handle, but at least for Aaron and the seventy elders. After all, wouldn’t that have helped support that all of the Torah came from G-d and that Moses didn’t “make it up?” The truth is that after the revelation at Sinai the Jews trusted Moses, so they were not concerned … but many years later, we Jews can be skeptical about the authorship of the Torah; after all, if G-d’s voice would have been heard by more people, wouldn’t it be more convincing?
Let’s take a moment and think about what happened at Sinai. Did G-d’s voice stop there, or did it continue on and on, ad infinitum? In reality, it had to have been stopped—since G-d is infinite, so his voice has to be infinite, so it has to be limited to time and space. Hence, even at Mount Sinai, there was a miracle to “limit” the voice of G-d so that the voice could be heard.
In essence, nothing new happened at the tent of meeting. The only thing that changed was who was able to hear the voice, but not that it was limited.
So why didn’t G-d want anyone to hear His voice other than Moses?
You may ask, if we all “hear” G-d's voice, would we have free choice to listen or not? No way! Of course we would listen! We would have no free choice. G-d however, wants us to have free choice. This is one of the cardinal principles in Judaism. Nothing gets in the way of free choice, to the point that G-d would rather us question whether or not He spoke to Moses, showing us that we have free choice, than convince us that he did speak to Moses, and then we don’t have free choice.
This principle has to come down to the simplest levels as well. We are curious people. We like to know what others are talking about, but is it good for us to know? Not always, because then we wouldn’t have free choice on how to act.
In today’s world of social media, it is hard for us to fathom, but that doesn’t change the reality that in order to have free choice, it is better not to be influenced by outside forces – if they are too overwhelming.
Learn, yes. Be inspired, of course! However, to have G-d reveal himself to us is a bit too much.