Gershom Scholem wrote a famous essay on religious authority and mysticism, and this seemed to me topical, both because it's interesting in and of itself and because the whole argument, I think, also tells us something about how Americans deal with authority, being a quite religious culture.
The part I'll excerpt, what really struck me (but there's only so much I can type) is at the end of the essay, where he's discussing the scholarly and religious response to the question: When the revelation was given to Israel at Mount Sinai,
"what, the question arises, is the truly divine element in the revelation? ...When the children of Israel received the Ten Commandments, what could they actually hear, and what did they hear?"
He gives various opinions. Some people thought that God spoke all the commandments directly and people heard them. Others thought that God spoke the first two, and then people were overwhelmed by the divine voice and couldn't hear the rest; Moses alone could withstand it, and then he repeated in a human voice what he had heard. Scholem then continues as follows. (the emphasis on the last line is mine.)
"This conception of Moses as interpreter of the divine voice from the people was developed much more radically by Maimonides, whose ideas R. Mendel of Rymanov carried to their ultimate conclusion. In R. Mendel's view not even the first two Commandments were revealed directly to the whole people. All that Israel heard was the aleph with which in the Hebrew text the first commandment begins, the aleph of the word `I'. This strikes me as a highly remarkable statement, providing much food for thought. For in Hebrew the consonant aleph represents nothing more than the position taken by the larynx when a word begins with a vowel. Thus the aleph may be said to denote the source of all articulate sound... To hear the aleph is to hear next to nothing, it is the preparation for all audible language, but in itself conveys no determinate, specific meaning. Thus, with his daring statement that the actual revelation to Israel consisted only of the aleph, R. Mendel transformed the revelation on Mt Sinai into a mystical revelation, pregnant with meaning, but without specific meaning. In order to become a foundation of religious authority, it had to be translated into human language, and this is what Moses did. In this light every statement on which authority is grounded would become a human interpretation, however valid and exalted, of something that transcends it. ... [T]he truly divine element in this revelation, the immense aleph, was not in itself sufficient to express the divine message, and in itself it was more than the community could bear. Only the prophet was empowered to communicate the meaning of this inarticulate voice to the community. It is mystical experience which conceives and gives birth to authority."
