The Event That Shaped How People Think About God

This Thursday night Jews around the world celebrate Shavuos, the holiday marking the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai.

Whatever your beliefs, the event is worth thinking about. About three million people gathered at a mountain in the desert and experienced the same thing at the same time. Mass revelation. There is nothing else like it in the historical record.

What they received were the first two of the ten commandments:

I am Hashem, your God who took you out of the land of Egypt. You shall have no other gods besides me.

Here is what is interesting about that. The first commandment is understood as the obligation to believe in God. But there is an obvious problem. To follow a commandment, you first have to believe there is someone giving the commandments. Belief cannot be one of the commandments. It has to come before the commandments even start.

The answer the commentators give is that belief is not a one-time decision. It is an ongoing obligation to keep examining, deepening, and internalizing the question of God’s existence. You don’t cross a threshold and move on. The inquiry itself is the obligation.

Three things emerge from that definition. God is the source of all existence. God is the force behind everything in the world, demonstrated by the exodus from Egypt. And God gave humanity the Torah, charging us with the development of our souls.

Existence. Providence. Torah. Time, space, and the human soul.

Those are not Jewish claims alone. They are the foundational claims that shaped how billions of people across three major religions understand existence, history, and human purpose. Sinai is where that started.