Notes Toward Sinaism

It is as if, cast out of the world, into the error of infinite migration, [Kafka] had to struggle ceaselessly to make of this outside another world and of this error the principle, the origin of a new freedom. . . . He already belongs to the other shore, and wandering does not consist in nearing Canaan, but in nearing the desert, the truth of the desert—in going always further in that direction. . .
- Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature

Nothingness opens on to everything. The city closes man in on himself; the desert opens him up to the Other. The polytheist prefers the vegetal, embellishments and valleys; his despiser prefers the mineral, abrupt canyons, limestone cliffs limned with geological phantasmagoria. The mountain, which is the desert on high for people of the plain, offers a variant of that ageless affinity evidenced in more clement climates. . . . in a temperate country, one can place one's Sinai in the snow, provided that it be set apart, combining sterility and steepness (like the Musa and Mount Moses, which have to be climbed by a ladder carved into the rock).
- Régis Debray, God: An Itinerary

Sinai, the Sinai, a metonymy for the border or frontier between Israel and the other nations, a front and a frontier between war and peace, a provocation to think the passage between the ethical, the messianic, eschatology, and the political, at the moment in the history of humanity and the Nation-State when the persecution of all these hostages—the foreigner, the immigrant (with or without papers), the exile, the refugee, those without a country, or a State, the displaced person or population (so many distinctions that call for careful analysis)—seems, on every continent, open to a cruelty without precedent.
- Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas

The desert causes our otherwise so-important everyday to evaporate, nothing remains of our small differences and conventionalisms. The atmosphere is charged with something of the eternal mystery of the universe; burning sun, lambent air, and glowing sand, sand, sand.
- Marcus Ehrenpreis, The Soul of the East

The voice must remain in the desert, and is never to be placed, to be embodied in the land as locality-country, kindred, father's house. The place is of the voice and not vice versa. Only the voice must remain holy, not the land. Thus, the voice that delivers the Israelites from slavery to bring them into the promised land, remains in the desert to keep the desert a living essence of the myth.
- Zali Gurevitch, "The Double Site of Israel"

In Essenism, Judaism points beyond the narrow context of Palestine; the retreat into solitariness of the desert unleashed great religious consequences which had their effects on primitive Christianity, the baptist movements in Transjordania and early gnosticism.
- Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism

In the wilderness Israel received the Torah, and thus in the wilderness, without land or soil, Israel became a nation.
- Samson Raphael Hirsch, Nineteen Letters

You do not go into the desert to find identity but to lose it, to lose your personality, to become anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. It is very hard in the desert. You must become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak.
- Edmond Jabès, The Book of Margins

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being.
- T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

We Jews still carry in our hearts the divine spark-the day star of the Orient. . . . We still bear in our soul the soul of the desert—the wide, vast spaces, the great silence, the great solitude, the silent watches of the night under the calm, large stars of the East, the flight of the alone to the Alone.
- Emma Lazarus

The Torah was given publicly in the wilderness, in no man's land, so that Jews may not to others, You have no share in it! Anyone wishing to accept it is welcome to it.
- Mekilta, to Exodus, 19.2

Wilderness is a necessary condition for every revelation, for every internalization of the Torah's teaching: "Whoever would wish to acquire Torah, must make himself ownerless like the wilderness."
- Midrash Rabba

The end of an individual life is, for him, the end of history; and every individual is a Moses who perishes outside the promised land.
- Rienhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man

Mount Sinai was - as the site of the greatest ever revelation of G-d - momentarily the holiest place on earth, yet as soon as the revelation was over, even animals were permitted to graze on it (Meshekh Chokhmah to Ex. 19: 13). The first tablets Moses brought down the mountain were supremely sacred. They had been hewn and written by G-d himself. Yet Moses broke them to show the Israelites that nothing is holy except in the context of fulfilling G-d's will (Meshekh Chokhmah to Ex. 32: 19). We endow objects and places with holiness, through our intentions, our words and our deeds. There is no such thing as ontological holiness, intrinsic sanctity.
- Jonathan Sacks, Covenant and Conversation

Human identity as a whole owes much more to its desert experience than to its dream of Eden in the forms of restful gardens . . . by privileging anecdotal narratives of protest and spiritual restlessness alongside the law and ritual, the Bible credits the desert as the site of a supreme skepticism unsettling all nationalist or individualist complacency.
- Ranen Omer-Sherman, Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert

What is the meaning of Sinai? The mountain on which sinah ("hostility") toward idolatry descended.
- Talmud: Sabbath, 89a.