The Sinai Experience: Hearing with the eyes, seeing with the ears

Shlomo M. Hamburger

Please also read on the Times of Israel blog.

A man was concerned that his wife might be experiencing some hearing issues. One evening, while she was chopping vegetables in the kitchen, the man stood about ten feet behind her and gently asked, “Honey, what’s for dinner?”

No response.

He stepped a little closer and repeated it, louder this time: “Honey, what’s for dinner?”

Still nothing.

So he took one more step forward and called out even louder: “Honey, what’s for dinner?”

And that’s when she turned around, gave him a look, and said: “For the third time: chicken and salad!”

Turns out she didn’t need a hearing aid, he just needed a little self-awareness.

Sometimes, it’s not just about hearing or listening; it’s about going deeper.

What if the real challenge isn’t just whether we hear or don’t hear, but whether we are even tuned into what lies behind the sound?

What if, just once, we could see what’s normally hidden in the noise?

There was a man, let’s call him Sam, who had a camera. Not just any camera; this one was old, worn-out, and clunky. He had bought it years ago at a thrift store in Vermont. The seller wasn’t sure if it even worked, but Sam didn’t really care. He simply liked how it felt in his hands.

The truth is, it didn’t work properly. The focus was always soft, and the light meter was erratic. Most people would have tossed it, but Sam took it everywhere.

He walked through the city’s alleyways, parks, and rooftops, simply observing. He raised the camera to his face, adjusted it, and clicked. Then he lowered it, looked again, squinted, and reframed.

The camera revealed the world to him and taught him how to perceive it. 

One day, someone gave him a gift: a mirrorless camera. It was top-of-the-line, featured a silent shutter, and had autofocus that tracked his eye. The lenses were like glass from heaven.

The images it captured were sharp, stunning, and pristine.

But something felt absent.

The photos lacked tension. There was no mystery, nor was there a question mark at the edge of the frame. They depicted objects rather than stories.

Sam soon realized that the old camera encouraged him to observe more deeply with his eyes. In contrast, the new one only revealed what was already obvious.

One morning, Sam walked along a wooded trail outside the city when he passed a group of high school students on a field trip. Their teacher was explaining how leaves breathe and release invisible oxygen through tiny pores.

One girl asked, “If trees breathe, why can’t we hear it?”

The teacher smiled. “Because some things you hear only when you stop listening for sound. Like when someone says one thing, and you hear what they didn’t say.”

Sam stopped walking. He thought about that sentence all day.

That night, he attended a Shavuot meal hosted by his cousin, where there was plenty of energy, laughter, and cheesecake. Sometime after midnight, someone quoted a strange line from the Torah: “And all the people saw the voices.”

Someone chuckled. “A poetic metaphor. You can’t see sound.”

Sam remained silent, yet he thought about the trees, the broken camera, and what it means to look again.

In 1937, on Erev Shavuot, the Frierdiker Rebbe, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, delivered a discourse on the verse: “And all the people saw the voices.”

He taught that this was not a matter of poetic license; it was a moment of spiritual transformation.

That night at Sinai, the people didn’t just hear G-d’s voice; they saw it. They perceived the Divine meaning within the sound. What is usually abstract became concrete, and what is normally believed became perceived.

They experienced G-d’s truth as something undeniably real; not theoretical, but felt.

That clarity didn’t vanish; it became embedded in us, in our collective memory, in our soul’s DNA.

The Frierdiker Rebbe’s discourse teaches that everything physical has a spiritual root. Sound, speech, and even the senses themselves originate from something higher.

At Sinai, the people didn’t just hear G-d’s words; they observed their source. They perceived the essence beyond the physical. Rather than simply hearing the voice, they saw what lay behind it.

And when that happens, you hear even what isn’t said. You feel the pause, the silence, the hiddenness, and you know that they are all part of the communication.

We don’t experience that state of perception every day, but we can catch glimpses of it.

When we listen to a speaker and truly concentrate, something changes. We block out distractions, follow the thread of thought, and then suddenly, it clicks.

“Oh… now I see what you’re saying.”

We didn’t see anything with our eyes. However, we understood something so clearly that it felt as if we had.

That’s what Shavuot is: a chance to receive the Torah as Torat Chayim, a living Torah—truth that we can see and through which we live.

To train ourselves, like Sam with his broken camera, to look deeper and listen more closely.

We live in a world where many people only see what the autofocus reveals to them.

But if we choose to walk a bit slower, to look again, to hear what wasn’t said…

Sometimes, when we stop assuming we know what’s happening and pause long enough to truly pay attention, we may begin to recognize the voice that has been speaking all along.

And once we see it, even for a moment, everything changes.