(RNS) — One of my adult students recently asked me: “You know how God spoke to Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebecca, Jacob, Moses, Isaiah and the rest of the prophets? Why doesn’t God speak anymore? Why did God just, well, shut up?”

It is a very good question.

A quick answer: After Malachi, there was no more prophecy, and God stopped speaking.

But the Talmud has a different answer.

Even though prophecy had officially ended by that time, the voice of God could sometimes speak to people in a bat kol, or soft, quiet tone. Literally, though, it means the “daughter of a voice.”

God could speak to us in the voice of a young girl. 

Which brings me to a great Jewish theologian who also happens to be among the youngest. She only had one line of theology, but I have remembered it for almost a decade. 

Some years ago in Hollywood, Florida, I was very close to the family of Rebecca Adler, now in her early 20s. She became bat mitzvah under my tutelage. But, for one exquisite moment, she became my teacher. 

One day, in our seventh-grade class, the kids were wondering aloud: What would it be like if God could speak to us? Would it be all thunder and lightning, or even something more intense? Or, perhaps, God speaks to us all the time, but we have lost the ability to hear the Divine Voice.

In the midst of this conversation, Rebecca piped up, and said: “Whenever we do a mitzvah, it is as if God is speaking to us again.”

I raise this issue because we are one day away from Shavuot, which marks when God gave the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. As you might imagine, it was pretty intense, which is maybe why it was the last time that God ever spoke to the entire Jewish people at one time. 

But, then again, there is that bat kol – the daughter of a voice – and in that seventh-grade class in Florida, Rebecca became that bat kol. Her words echoed two of the most important Jewish thinkers of modern times.

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) was a layperson living in Germany who died at the age of 43, several years before Hitler took power. Rosenzweig had been the product of an assimilated German Jewish family, and he came perilously close to converting to Christianity — until an all-day Yom Kippur experience in synagogue shook him to his core. He knew then he did not need a “new” covenant to live with God — he already lived in covenant.

“Books are not now the prime need of the day,” Rosenzweig proclaimed. “What we need more than ever are human beings — Jewish human beings.”

Rosenzweig meant that we can no longer rely on what earlier generations of scholarly editors had culled for us out of the pages of Judaism. We can no longer visit a predigested Judaism. We can only know what is essential to us through life and study. Only an encounter with the totality of the tradition would work. That, and only that, would bring us to our own personal and collective Sinais.

He also had a particular way of understanding what happened between God and the Jewish people at Sinai — that God and Israel met at Mount Sinai. 

That encounter had no content. But it led to a relationship between God and the Jewish people: God shows up. We feel God’s presence. And out of that overwhelming presence, the Jewish people intuited what it was that they had to do to honor that relationship with God.

God’s presence is commanding, but because that relationship was, by definition, a personal relationship, every Jew would interpret it according to his or her own ability. He wanted Jews to do as much as they were personally able to do.

In a letter to philosopher Martin Buber, Rosenzweig suggested:

The deed is created at the boundary of the merely do-able, where the voice of the commandments causes the spark to leap from “I must” to “I can.” The Law is built on such commandments, and only on them.

Rosenzweig wanted Jews to remain open to the possibility of Jewish growth. Hence his now-famous response to the question, do you put on tefillin?: “Not yet.”

His Judaism was a big Judaism. “Not one sphere of life ought to be surrendered,” he wrote. “Nothing Jewish is alien to me.” For the individual Reform Jew, one’s practice could be a continuation of that quest — in which every Jewish act is potentially open to us. In other words, it is no longer “I do what I want to do.” It now becomes: “I do what I can do.”

Rebecca Adler was also echoing the great theologian and social activist Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Heschel paraphrased a Hasidic teaching: “When we fulfill a mitzvah and perform an acceptable deed, we grasp man’s attachment to God. If it were possible to say so, God is revealed in our deeds, in the depths of our being we perceive the divine voices.”

When we do a mitzvah – not just a good deed, but a commandment — and when we live our lives in a meaningful way because of our relationship with God, and with the Jewish past, the Jewish future and the Jewish people, yes, it is as if we have heard God speaking to us.

As we approach Shavuot, that teaching I first heard from a 13-year-old lives within me — a teaching that echoed two of the greatest Jewish thinkers of modern times, and a teaching that might give shape to our own spiritual lives. 

Chag sameach! Have a joyous Shavuot.