Seeing Sounds

All the people saw the sounds, the flames, the blast of the ram's horn, and the mountain smoking. The people trembled when they saw it, keeping their distance.                                                                                     Exodus 20:15

            Our traditional commentators differ in their understanding of the phrase “all the people saw the sounds.” Chief among those who understand literally that the verse refers to a supernatural experience is Rashi, who comments: “they saw that which was spoken, that which is impossible in a setting other than the revelation at Sinai.” Kli Yakar [R. Ephraim of Lunschitz (1540 - 1619)] phrases the point more intensely, when he writes: “every word which left the mouth of the Holy One, blessed be He, became corporeal and so real that the letters of the words could be seen, as if they were written.”

            Other commentators suggest a variety of explanations which understand the phrase to refer to a natural occurrence.  Rashi’s grandson, Rashbam posits that the words “saw the sounds” mean that the people saw the “hail and stones” which accompanied the sound of God’s voice. [Exodus 9:28] Others among the early commentators explain simply that the word “saw” in our verse’s context means “perceived.”

            Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch offers an additional suggestion: the ability to clearly identify the source of sound requires both vision and auditory perception. With closed eyes, one can determine only the general direction from which a sound emanates. Thus, the verse can be understood to mean that the Israelites clearly saw that the sounds heard at Sinai came from the flashes of lightning which accompanied the divine revelation, and therefore they knew the sounds to be the divine voice.

            Science offers additional insights into the possible meaning of “seeing sounds.” The speed of light is 874,030 times that of sound. Thus, the visual experience is more immediate and perhaps much more intense that the auditory experience. My cousin, physicist Professor Daniel Menachem Siegel comments that “vision is much richer and more complex than hearing, with so many more possibilities for interesting effects—rainbows, mirages and diffraction patterns and haloes and optical illusions of all sorts. Even physical optics is unbelievably complex, and when you get into the physiological/perceptual aspects, it becomes truly impossible. The best minds in physics sacrificed years of effort to understanding color vision, and it is still a puzzle. So I'd see the ‘seeing’ of the voices as giving more scope to the experience.”

            There is an additional aspect of the difference between vision and hearing. Light essentially is unlimited. Astronomers tell us that some stars which will be visible tonight ceased to exist billions of years ago, but due to the vast distances in space, we continues to see their light. In contrast, the distance which sound can travel is very limited. Therefore, we can understand “seeing the sounds” during the revelation at Sinai to mean that the sounds Israel heard while standing at the foot of “the mountain of God” [Exodus 18:5] took on the unlimited [and eternal]aspect of vision, since those sounds issued from the divine voice.