Our tradition is unique. We are the only religion in history to relate that G-d appeared in front of three million people and spoke to them. We are the only nation that claims to have witnesses to a revelation who could be accessed afterward. Every other religion started with one man or a small group of men (most often no more than two people) who claimed that the L-rd told them to tell everyone to change their lives. Yeah, right! Our religion is the only one that says that the entire nation of three million people saw G-d appear to them together. The reason for this is that a claim like that is impossible to make up. A religion based on such a claim could never get off the ground unless the event actually happened. The founder of the religion would never be able to persuade his followers to listen to him unless they had actually heard G-d speak.
That is why every charlatan who ever wanted to start his own religion had to claim he had experienced a private prophecy. He couldn’t start with a claim that people knew was untrue, nor could he make a claim that they could investigate and find to be false. It would have been the end of his religion. Although all the liars who started false religions would have loved to claim a public revelation to add to the new religion’s credibility, they did not because it would have worked against them. They had to resort to claiming a private vision — even though it has no credibility — so nobody could disprove it. We, however, have the well-known tradition of a public revelation in front of the whole nation, which would be impossible to make up.
A public revelation is the only sensible way for G-d to reveal His wishes. If He had appeared to one man and told him to convince everyone about His message, how would that be fair? How could people be expected to figure out whether this man was telling the truth? With so many people claiming to have experienced personal revelations from G-d, how could people be expected to figure out who the right one was? How could people even be expected to know that there was a right one, instead of assuming that all of them were lying? There would be no way for anyone to know the truth. That would mean that G-d would be expecting people to trust with no reason for doing so and to somehow guess whom to trust. It would be cruel for G-d to give His laws in an unverifiable way and then to punish everyone who didn’t guess right! That would be evil! The only sensible way for G-d to reveal Himself was to do it in a way that could be verified. And that is precisely what Hashem did for us when He gave us the Torah publicly, in front of the entire nation.
We are fortunate that Hashem revealed Himself to us in an event that proves that His Torah is true. Armed with this knowledge, we will have the strength to stand strong against the yetzer hara and achieve incredible success in the battle of the generation.
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