30 May 2025
Question
I was researching the reason for the custom of staying awake all night studying Torah on Shavuot. I read that on the morning of the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, the entire Jewish nation slept in. G-d had to wake them up to hear the Ten Commandments. This seems a little far-fetched. Wasn’t there a single insomniac up that night? Or a baby crying at 4:00 a.m.? How could two million people all sleep in?
Answer
You’re right. I can’t even get all my kids to sleep in (except on school days). For the entire nation to oversleep sounds like a setup. And it was.
On that momentous morning, when G-d gave the Torah to the Jewish nation, not only were every man, woman, and child present, but all Jewish souls of future generations were there too. You and I, and every Jew who ever lived, heard G-d’s voice speak the Ten Commandments. And though we can’t remember it, we will never forget it.
The revelation at Sinai implanted in every Jewish soul an innate and unbreakable connection to Torah, to mitzvot, to living an actively Jewish life. Every Jew, deep down, wants to be Jewish and wants to keep the Torah. We can’t help it. It’s in our soul. What we heard from G-d’s mouth, we can never unhear.
And yet, some Jews don’t seem interested. Some seem far from any observance of Torah, and it doesn't seem to bother them. Their souls were also at Mt. Sinai, so why don’t they feel the need to connect?
They do. They’re just sleeping.
A Jewish soul is always connected to Judaism. Sometimes, that connection is dormant. But the time will come when it awakens. It may be a crisis. It may be a sudden inspiration. But it will happen. Every Jewish soul will one day snap out of its slumber.
This was all set up at Sinai. G-d orchestrated that we should all be asleep, so He would have to wake us up. This was a message to all souls for all time: no matter how deeply you’re sleeping, no matter how disengaged you may feel, your soul is ready to jump up and reconnect at any moment.
Some souls are just lightly napping—as soon as they’re exposed to real Judaism, they wake up. Others are deep in hibernation. It may take a war in Israel and a global rise in Jew-hatred to shake them out of their sleep. But when it happens, it happens instantaneously. When sleeping Jews are poked, we return to living as Jews. Because our connection to Torah is not acquired. It was there all along.
Source
Arugas Habosem, Rabbi Moshe Grunwald (1853–1910)