Ki Tissa

Breaking the Tablets – Rachel Adelman

Rachel Adelman teaches Torah in Jerusalem and its environs. She is currently working on her doctoral dissertation in midrash at the Hebrew University. When she is not writing academic papers and divrei Torah, it is poetry that flows from her pen. She lives on a lovely, dead-end street in Jerusalem, with her husband and four children.

After forty days and forty nights at the top of Mount Sinai, Moshe is told of the people's shenanigans around the golden calf. The prophet pleads their cause and God then promises not to wipe them out. "Thereupon Moshe turned and went down from the mountain bearing the tablets of the Covenant, tablets inscribed on both sides, inscribed on one side and the other; they were the work of God, and the writing, the writing of God, inscribed on the tablets." (Ex. 32:15). Yet when Moshe saw the golden calf and the dancing, he hurled the tablets down so that they shattered at the foot of the mountain (v. 19). How did he dare? God's ineffable name was engraved in that stone, and the letters themselves were "inscribed with the finger of God" (Ex. 31:8).

The midrash (collection of traditional rabbinic narratives), Pirkei deRabbi Eliezer (PRE) chapter 45, imaginatively re-writes this scene, endowing the letters with a will of their own: Moshe took the tablets, and as he descended (the Mountain), the letters held themselves, and so did Moshe. But when they saw the drums and the dancing and the calf, they flew up from the tablets, which then became unbearably heavy in Moshe's arms, and he could no longer carry himself or the tablets, so he thrust them from his arms and they broke, as it says, "And he shattered them at the foot of the mountain" (Ex. 32:19). (PRE 45).

The midrash is suggesting that Moshe did not hurl but, rather, dropped the tablets because he could no longer bear their weight; thus he is exonerated. Before the sin of the golden calf, the letters 'floated', suspended in the stone, bearing their own weight. As long as the letters carried themselves, the stone was also imbued with a 'bearable lightness of being'. As the midrash says of the letters, 'read not harut, engraved, but heirut, free' (PRE 46). Only the letters of Torah imbue the tablets with sanctity and when they fly away they leave behind merely profane stone; smashing the tablets then entails no irreverence.

I'd like to suggest that the buoyancy of the letters within the stone reflects the state of the nation, as Mishnah Avot 6:2 on the same word-play suggests: "for one is only free when one is engaged in Torah study." That is, as long as they were one with God's command, "they were free" like the letters; but as soon as they distanced themselves, through idolatry, the letters flew off, and the tablets become solid, pure density, sacral space, like the golden calf itself, and Moshe could no longer bear them (the tablets/the people) or himself. When Moshe smashes the tablets, he acts the paragon iconoclast (lit. "breaker of idols"). He insists that the God of language and law, represented by the blank space suspended in stone, replace the penchant for thingness, the concrete solidity of idols.

The Talmud states that had they not sinned with the golden calf, the Torah would never have been forgotten (Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 54a). Chiseled in the minds of all who had stood at Sinai, the Torah would have become a source of 'genetic, collective memory.' Yet there is comfort in the second set of tablets. In a famous statement by Reish Lakish, God's affirms Moshe's smashing them: "Good that you broke them (yesher ko'ah she'shibarta)" (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 87a). Forgetting necessitates invention or, at least, interpretation; had there been only the written Torah, engraved in the mind of every member of the nation, there would have been no necessity for the oral tradition.

May you find the letters of Torah buoyant within your soul and breathe through them the breath of life.

Shabbat Shalom!