Dialogue
Thoughts on Ki Tissa 2019
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As his forty-day rendezvous with God drew to an end,
Moshe received the luhot:
And
He gave Moshe when He had finished speaking with him on Har Sinai the two
tablets of the Covenant, tablets of stone written by the finger of God. (Shemot 32:18)
Those days were
filled with deep dialogue, and now – “when He had finished speaking with him” –
Moshe was handed a physical manifestation of Torah. Receiving the luhot, then,
represented the shift from a spoken mode of transmission to one that
was textual. The luhot were, in the words of Avivah Gottlieb
Zornberg, “the permanent residue of a dialogue between God and man.”[1]
Descending Har
Sinai and encountering the panicked people of Am Yisrael, however, Moshe
reflected upon the dangers of a system that could potentially deemphasize presence
and dialogue. It was, after all, Moshe’s absence that inspired het
ha-egel:
And
the people saw that Moshe lagged in coming down from the mountain, and the
people assembled against Aharon and said to him: “Rise up, make us gods that
will go before us, for this man Moshe who brought us up from the land of Egypt,
we do not know what has happened to him.” (32:1)
And so, Moshe then “flung
the tablets from his hand and smashed them at the bottom of the mountain”
(32:20). Realizing the importance of personal involvement to the Torah’s
transmission and fearing the danger of a potentially “impersonal” growth by
means of the “speechless” luhot, Moshe sought their immediate
destruction.
The Hakhamim
famously portrayed the altered reality that resulted from smashing the luhot:
“If the tablets had not been broken, Torah would not have been forgotten in
Israel.”[2]
Surprisingly, however, Ibn Ezra cited from R. Saadia Gaon, who contended that
the second luhot were in fact greater than the first ones that he
smashed.[3]
Basing himself on several midrashim, Nessiv explained that the second luhot
differed from the first by introducing the reality of Torah she-be-al
peh – the Oral Law. While Moshe received a vast knowledge of Torah and its
laws at the time that he received the first set of tablets, the possibility of
future interpretation and creative commentary, as transmitted from teacher to
student, was born only with the second luhot.
The first luhot were
“God’s doing” (32:16), which represented an explicit reception from God and the
impossibility of forgetting. The second tablets, in contrast, were crafted by
Moshe (34:1) and prone to the human reality of forgetting, thus emerging as the
forebearer of oral transmission.[4]
Indeed, in the
aftermath of het ha-egel Moshe seemed focused on the restoration of
God’s presence amongst the people. He moved the Tent, and named it “Ohel
Mo’ed – the Tent of Meeting”:
And
Moshe would take the Tent and pitch it outside the camp, far from the camp, and
he called it Ohel Mo’ed (the
Tent of Meeting). And so, whoever sought God would go out to Ohel Mo’ed
which was outside the camp. (33:7)
And the nation
understood and appreciated his own dialogue with God:
And
so, when Moshe would go out to the Tent, all the people would rise and each man
would station himself at the entrance of his tent and they would look after
Moshe until he came to the Tent. And so, when Moshe would come to the Tent, the
pillar of cloud would come down and stand at the entrance of the Tent and speak
with Moshe. And all the people would see the pillar of cloud standing at the
entrance to the Tent, and all the people would rise and bow down each man at
the entrance of his tent.
(33:8-10)
Am Yisrael then learned that transmitting
the Torah entailed more than merely passing down a text; it required presence
and dialogue:
And
God would speak to Moshe face-to-face, as a man speaks to his fellow. (33:11)
In her best-selling
book Alone Together, psychologist Sherry Turkle pointed to a particular
digression that has emerged with our smartphones. The invention of the first
telephones, she observed, enhanced our long-distance expressions of emotion by
moving us from the impersonal texts of letters and telegrams to sharing our
actual voices. Our smartphones, in contrast, depersonalize even our
short-distance expressions of emotion by replacing our voices with the words
and letters of text-messages, emails and Twitter posts. Turkle quoted a friend,
who remarked: “We cannot all write like Lincoln or Shakespeare, but even the
least gifted among us has this incredible instrument, our voice, to communicate
the range of human emotion. Why would we deprive ourselves of that?”[5]
The failure of the
first luhot stemmed from feelings of absence – Moshe’s immediate disappearance
from the people, and the potential of God’s transcendence “when He had finished
speaking with him.” And so, the creation of the second luhot and all
that then ensued were meant to restore those lost feelings of communion
and conversation. In a world that increasingly reverts to a reality akin
to the first luhot, perhaps it is time to contemplate the enduring
lesson of the second tablets and restore presence and dialogue to
our lives.
[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The
Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (New York, NY, 2001), pg.
399.
[2] Eruvin 54a.
[3] Commentary of Ibn Ezra (ha-kassar)
to Shemot 34:1, s.v. pesol.
[4] R. Naftali Sevi Yehudah
Berlin, HaAmek Davar to Shemot 34:1, s.v. ve-katavti.
[5] Sherry Turkle, Alone
Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (New
York, NY, 2011), pg. 207.