We Were All At Sinai

This is the d’var Torah I delivered for Shavuot at Congregation Neveh Shalom on Friday, May 22.

On Shavuot, we return again to Sinai. Not only to remember it, but to relive it.

The rabbis teach that every Jewish soul—past, present, and future—stood at Sinai when Torah was given. Every one of us. The scholar and the skeptic. The deeply observant and the quietly searching. The Jew fluent in Hebrew and the one who only knows how to hum along to the melody of a prayer. We were all there.

And that matters because Sinai was never meant to belong to only one kind of Jew. This beautiful text study reminds us that sacred space in Judaism has always wrestled with one central question: who belongs?

One of the most striking teachings comes from Vayikra Rabbah, which describes the Temple courtyard somehow holding all of Israel at once. The midrash says it was “one of the places where a small space held a great multitude.” People stood crowded together, yet somehow there was still room for everyone.

Clearly, this is about more than architecture; this is theology. Holiness, Judaism teaches, expands, and sacred space is meant to stretch itself to hold the fullness of the Jewish people.

Honestly, this concept feels increasingly urgent right now when we think about the Kotel and the growing fractures within the Jewish world. The fight over the Kotel has never been only about prayer sections or who holds a Torah scroll. It has become symbolic of a much larger and more painful question: who gets counted as a legitimate Jew in the Jewish state?

For years, many Diaspora Jews—especially Conservative, Reform, egalitarian, and pluralistic communities—have watched an Israeli government increasingly shaped by ultra-Orthodox political power make decisions that feel less about unity and more about control. The freezing of the Kotel compromise in 2017 was not simply a political maneuver. For many Jews around the world, it felt like being told “your Judaism matters less here.”

And that heartbreak runs deep precisely because Israel and the Kotel matter so much to us. It’s devastating because Judaism keeps reminding us that at Sinai, revelation came through collective presence, not ideological uniformity. The Torah was not given only to the strictest voice in the camp. It was given to an entire people. The midrash teaches that God’s voice split into many voices and many languages so that everyone could hear Torah in a way they could receive it. Sinai was spiritually pluralistic from the very beginning.

The Torah says, “And let them make Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.” It doesn’t say “within it.” It says “among them.” Rabbi Moshe Alshekh paid close attention to this. God does not dwell primarily in buildings of wood and stone, he says, but within people themselves. The holiness of sacred space comes from the people who gather there.

Which means when Jews are pushed away from sacred space—women carrying Torah, egalitarian families, LGBTQ Jews, Jews whose practice differs from state-sanctioned Orthodoxy—it is not only those Jews who are diminished. The holiness of the space itself is diminished.

This is not a call for less Judaism. It is a call for a Judaism expansive enough to hold the Jewish people. Because Shavuot reminds us that Torah was given in the wilderness, in open space, where no one tribe could build walls around revelation.

And perhaps that is our charge this year: to resist the temptation to shrink Judaism into camps of “real” and “not real,” worthy and unworthy. To insist that Jewish unity does not require sameness. To build communities and support an Israel that remembers the lesson of Sinai: that covenant was created when all of us stood there together.

Because we were all at Sinai. And if we were all there then, every Jew deserves a place at the wall, at the table, and within the story of the Jewish people now.