Parashat Yitro: Getting Stronger

Vayehi kol hashofar holekh vehazek me’od. The sound of the shofar blast on Mount Sinai is described as getting stronger and stronger. Rashi points out that this is a sign of its divine origin; when a human being makes a sound, the sound gradually gets weaker and weaker; only God’s sound keeps increasing in strength.

We know about this gradual dying down of strength and energy, this weakening over time. We work hard, put our energy into things, and gradually, we become wiped out, exhausted. We peter out.

In the face of this human tendency toward exhaustion, it feels important to remember the indefatigable neverending divine energy, to feel its existence in the world, and perhaps sometimes the possibility of its existence inside of us.

Because the pasuk does not end by saying that God’s shofar got stronger and stronger. The next phrase speaks of a human being, Moshe. “Moshe would speak and God would answer him with the sound.” Rashi explains that when Moshe told the people commandments, God gave Moshe extra strength and capacity in order to be really heard.

In other words, when we align ourselves with God’s work in the world, when we make ourselves into vessels for His words and Presence, then that ever increasing source of divine energy flows through us. Our voices, too, instead of fading out from exhaustion are able to grow in strength and confidence.

We are mostly identified with our small human selves, those small selves that work in the world and experience continual limitations. These limitations, too, are important and have something to teach us about letting go and not doing it all and very much not being divine. But we also have a little bit of the divine inside us, a tiny littel pure point that sustains us and nourishes us and, like the Eternal Light, does not go out.

I think some of our exhaustion comes from not acknowledging this capacity, from not allowing ourselves to feel it and trust it and surrender to it, from constantly fighting to control everything with our limited human capacities and not leaving any room for the divine to enter. It is partly the fight to control that exhausts us. Moshe spoke and God answered him with the limitless voice of the divine. He allowed himself to become part of the flow.