It was a magical day. Thunder. Lightening. Thick clouds obscuring your vision, making you wonder if what you were seeing was real. Fire. Earthquakes. And through it all, Hashem’s voice boomed. A day for the ages! In his fascinating, though historically questionable Worlds in Collision, Immanuel Velikovsky cites numerous sources from other cultural teachings indicating volcanoes, floods, fires and plagues of vermin throughout the world during this period of time. Apparently, the local events of that particular place were reflected by global natural occurrences.

And the spot where it happened, as we are told in the first pasuk of the parsha, was Har Sinai. True, it is a place with many names, such as Chorev, Kadesh, etc (Shabbos 89a-b). According to R. Abahu, the actual name was Sinai and all the other appellations were merely nicknames based on what happened there that day. For example, it is called Chorev because churbah, or destruction, came to idolaters from that place. It is called Kadesh because the Jewish people were sanctified on that day.

However, according to R Yossi, the son of R Chanina, even before the momentous events at Har Sinai, the spot is it is referred to as Chorev (Shemos 3:1). Why, then, is it called Sinai?

Ibn Ezra (3:2) says that Sinai comes from its bushes, senaim; in fact, since the “burning bush” [sneh] episode took place here as well, this may have contributed to the Sinai tag as well. Interestingly, Ibn Ezra explains that the sneh was a dry, thorny bush, and those who inhabited places with many senaim would turn to Divine powers to bring rain and water to their lands. Thus, it was an appropriate place for Bnei Yisrael to be on that day, a place where they, in their dryness, would turn to Hashem for the flowing water, the gurgling spring that is the Torah.

Chazal offer a different reason for the designation of the name Sinai, namely, because it is a mountain on which hatred [sinah] fell upon idolators. This is a curious reason for an event that seems at first blush to be so wondrous, so positive. Sinah… hatred?! Rashi posits that the hatred emanated from Hashem toward the non-Jewish nations who had rejected His Torah. The Talmud (Avodah Zarah, 2b) notes that Hashem brought the Torah around to “every nation and every tongue, but none accepted it until He came to Klal Yisrael who received it.” Hashem hated the nations for not striving to become better, to achieve more than their commonplace existence. In making this choice, they opted out of a closer relationship with Hashem, forgoing forever His holiness and uniqueness.

However, the Rambam in his Iggeret Teiman suggests that the sinah here refers to the nations’ hatred and jealousy of Bnei Yisrael’s new status and elevated relationship with Hashem. We are the “goody two shoes” to their “rebellious son,” the Yakov Avinu to their Esav, or perhaps, the Harry Potter to their Draco Malfoy.

It does not quite seem fair: we are hated before we even start. More fittingly, it is the punishment in our parsha’s tochacha, which says that if we do not follow Hashem’s ways, only then will we be destroyed by our enemies. Yet despite this apparent lack of justice, the words do ring true: people don’t seem to like us Jews very much, and it may often be based on jealousy. One need only read recent comments about the Israel lobby manipulating Washington’s Iraq policy, or age old claims of Jews controlling the financial markets and media outlets to know the green of envy that can rear its ugly head in our direction.

Our lesson then, just days before our yearly kabbalas ha-Torah on Shavuos, is twofold: as with Rashi’s interpretation of the Talmud, we must cherish the gifts we received and accepted, and Hashem’s relationship with us as the chosen people. Yet, simultaneously, we must also be sensitive to what those gifts represent to others, and be wary of the hatred of other nations towards us, as Rambam suggests. It is easy to lose sight of the notion that local events can have global significance, but we must learn to balance others’ negative feelings with our perception of good, to avoid incurring the jealousy of others, while striving for a closer connection to the “magic” of Hashem.