In rabbinic tradition, Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. In this week leading up to the festival (it begins on Thursday night; join us to celebrate with worship and cheesecake on Friday night and/or Saturday morning), let’s explore some classical and modern imaginations of the moment itself.

I see numbers in colors, which is one of the more common forms of synesthesia. For me, three is a sunny yellow, four is bright red, five is a brilliant green, six is pale blue, seven is royal blue, eight is muddy brown, and so on. I do Sudoku puzzles by colors, not by the shapes of numbers. I remember phone numbers by colors, too. If the colors go together, I’ll never forget the number. If they clash, it’s almost impossible to recall. When I went to my hometown, Ann Arbor, for my thirtieth high-school reunion, I picked up the phone and called a friend I hadn’t seen in decades—on a number I remembered (and still do). I hate the number nineteen: one is white, nine is black. It’s like good and evil in one number. It makes me shudder.

This is how author Robin Wright describes her experience as a synesthete, a trait—or condition—she shares with many famous artists, including Marilyn Monroe, actor Geoffrey Rush, and musicians Duke Ellington, Billy Joel, and Pharrell, who described his hit song “Happy” as being yellow with accents of mustard and sherbet orange. 

Wright continues to explain: “The word synesthesia comes from the Greek “syn,” or union, and “aesthesis” or sensation, literally meaning the joining of the senses—a kind of neurological crosstalk … Scientists now believe that, physiologically, synesthesia is produced when regions of the brain communicate with one another. “Think of it like two countries with porous borders,” Dr. David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford said. “In most brains, they stay separate. But, in the synesthete’s brain, they communicate.””

I do not want to make any unsubstantiated claims, but I would guess that one of the earliest descriptions of synesthesia occurs in the Biblical telling of the moment of revelation. In that moment I described yesterday, with the thunder and the lightning, the verbs are all switched around—the people heard the lightning and saw the thunder, and in the pièce de résistance, we read (Exodus 20:15): All the people saw the voices. 

Seemingly unsure of a collective experience of a neurological condition—or more likely unaware of its existence completely, our tradition has nonetheless wondered for centuries about this moment and this phenomenon. How, we have asked, is it possible to see a voice? 

Here is one answer for your Tuesday morning—though perhaps not one to try on your morning commute. The Sfat Emet, Rabbi Yehuda Lev Alter of Ger, teaching in the 19th century, offers this idea: He writes that when the Divine voice spoke, each one of Israel saw the root of his or her own life force. With his or her very eyes, each one saw the part of the Divine soul that lives within. Here, again, is an invitation to each of us to experience revelation for ourselves, to dig deep and understand what Torah we need—and what Torah we have to share. 

Even in the midst of a radical communal experience, each and every one of us matters.

—Rabbi Sari Laufer