Tuesday, April 21, 2009

"The Mount Sinai experience was beyond the boundaries of time and space"


“The students of the Baal Shem Tov said, ‘When we studied Torah with the Baal Shem Tov, it was with thunder and lightning and the sound of the shofar, as it was when the Torah was given on Mt. Sinai, when 'all the people saw the thunder . . . and the nation feared and moved and stood from afar.'


The Mt. Sinai experience was a transcendental experience, beyond the boundaries of time and space, existing forever.

Like the creation of the world, it is a permanent state, not a one-time act but an ongoing activity.

Whenever one sits and studies Torah properly, one hears the voice of God.”

--Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz

From Learning from the Tanya, p. 213, by Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz