Let My People Know

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz: “A heretic said to Rabban Gamliel.”

The passage in Sanhedrin 49a reports that a heretic said to Rabban Gamliel: “You say that on every assembly of ten men the Shekhinah rests.

How many Divine Presences have you, then?”

And he replied to him with an example of the light of the sun which enters through many windows .

Although each window is different from the other in its form and location, and the light that enters is apparently a different shaft of light, the sun that shines through all of them is one and the same.

—Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz