This is the third in a a series of essays written by Ed Codish
for a prayer group trying to link the Conservative, Orthodox and
reform Jewish communities in southeastern Michigan. This essay,
more technical perhaps than the first two, offers a way to read
Jewish texts which may make them available to far more Jews than
is now the case. Certainly, that is the intention, and judging by
the response so far, it may be working.
I also enclose a poem which I offer with some
trepidation. It is very easily misunderstood.
The Shattered Tablets of the Law
By Ed Codish
I am going to suggest a way to read Jewish sacred texts,
including Torah, the Prophets, the Writings, Mishna, Gemmara,
Midrash, and rabbinical commentaries on these. I shall use the
word "Torah" as inclusive of these texts. I start from the
viewpoint that the texts are intelligible and infinite, which is
a contradiction, and from the viewpoint that the only way we have
of approaching God, other than through each other, is through
these texts. So reading them is crucial. The subject is immense,
and this essay only a beginning.
The texts are broken at their source, the tablets of Law
shattered by Moses who brought them to us (although he did make a
copy), and no ordinary process of reading makes much sense. I am
not the first (there was no first) to approach this difficulty. I
begin with a few Rabbinical comments on the shattered tablets.
These are not given chronologically, because they were not so
conceived. All Israel, we are told in another set of comments,
stood together to receive the Law, and all Israel included the
living, the dead, and the not yet born. Standing together there,
we certainly talked to each other. Just as certainly, we all
heard the same voice, saying the same words, and we all heard
something different. (There is a closely related difficulty in
reference to the different wording of the commandments as given
in Exodus and in Deuteronomy, but I leave that for elsewhere.)
Among the approaches to these texts, to Judaism (perhaps
to any text based religion), and to God, two suggest themselves
here. We can either attempt to determine what was really said, or
we can examine, and live in, the tensions of multiple meanings,
manifold readings. I think the texts as we have them, in one
pattern of reading, demands the second alternative.
When Moses descends from Mount Sinai carrying the tablets
of the Law, he encounters Joshua, who has waited forty days and
forty nights for him. They hear sounds from the encampment.
Joshua, who is, in addition to being a religious leader, the
military commander of Israel, says, "There is a noise of war in
the camp." Moses disputes Joshua's reading of the sound. No, he
says, "It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery,
neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome, but
the voice of them that sing do I hear." (Exodus 32:18; the
translation here is that of The Jewish Publication Society:
Philadelphia, 1955. Translations hereafter will be mine, except
where indicated.) The Jews are worshipping the Golden Calf. Moses
throws down the tablets of the Law, and they shatter at his feet.
In the Talmud we read (Baba Batra 14a) that according to R Resh
Lakish, God congratulated Moses for shattering the Tablets. R.
Marc-Alain Ouaknin writes, "The breaking of the tablets is not
the destruction of the Law; it is, on the contrary, the gift of
the Law in the form of its breaking." (The Burnt Book, Princeton
University Press: Princeton, 1995, p. 300) R. Yehuda Loew ben
Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, writing in the sixteenth century,
adds that the reason the divinely written Law had to be shattered
was that "Israel was not at the status of Man, but at the status of the angels." (Tiferet Yisrael, p. 102) All of this requires
additional explanation, explication and expansion, and that is
the basic idea and purpose of the whole enterprise of Judaism.
Various traditions exist as to the contents of the
shattered tablets. These are gathered together in the Jerusalem
Talmud (fourth century), and in the aggadic midrash, Shir
Hashirim Rabba (sixth century). For practical purposes of legal
determinations, the two sets of tablets, those written by God and
those written by Moses, are conventionally held to be identical.
This obviates any attempt to argue that Moses did not understand
what God had said, and that the "real" Law lies shattered
somewhere in the desert. And indeed, no source argues that the
Ten Commandments as we have them were not those given by God to
Moses. The distinctions between the two sets of Law are more
subtle than differences in wording.
In Exodus 32:15 the tablets carved by God are described:
"And Moses turned and descended the mountain and the two tablets
of testimony were in his hand, tablets written on both sides,
from this and this they were written. And the tablets were the
work of God, and the writing was God's writing graven on the
tablets." Rashi (R. Shlomo Yitzchaki), writing in the eleventh
century, comments that a miracle was involved. This is because
the letters, which were carved through the stone, would have
fallen out, if readable from both sides. But Rashi has
restricted himself programmatically to a more or less literal
reading of the text. As he knew, another reading existed.
In the Jerusalem Talmud (Sheqalim 25a), we read: "How
were the tablets written? R. Hanania ben Gamliel says five on
this tablet and five on the other tablet, as it is written, 'And
He wrote them on two tablets of stone, five on this tablet and
five on that tablet.' But the Rabbis say ten on this tablet and
ten on that tablet, as it is written, 'And He told you of His
covenant, the ten words,' ten on this tablet and ten on that. R.
Shimon ben Yohai says twenty on this tablet and twenty on that
tablet, as it is written, 'And He wrote them on two tablets of
stone,' twenty on this tablet and twenty on that tablet. R. Simai
says forty on this tablet and forty on that tablet, as it is
written, 'Tablets written from both sides, from this and from
that,' in a square." This is repeated in the Jerusalem Talmud in
Sota 36b, which assesses the dimensions of the tablets and gives
the arrangement of the broken and whole tablets in the ark. The
conversational reading is again given in Shir Hashirim Rabba
5:19.
This is a strange conversation - a strange reading of the
text of Exodus - from a number of points of view. First, since
there is no real disagreement that the whole tablets written by
Moses were written with five commandments on each tablet, why is
there any reason to doubt that the divine tablets were similarly
written? Second, why should the commandments, ten in number, be
repeated so many times ? In R. Simai's reading, each is graven
eight times. Third, why do the Rabbis disagree? We would normally
expect further discussion in such a case, but there is none.
In Tiferet Yisrael, (Chapter 35, pp. 101-102 in standard
editions) R. Judah Loew, the Maharal, offers a reading of both
the text of Exodus and that of the Rabbis cited. Greatly to
simplify, the Maharal determines that a product of God must be
perfect, and therefore all the ten commandments must exist on
each tablet; otherwise each would be incomplete and imperfect.
Here, the conceit is simple enough. But the Maharal goes on to
insist that the tablets had to be identical no matter what the
point of view of the observer. The rabbis represented this aspect
of the tablets by assuming a square shape, with the ten
commandments graven in normal Hebrew right to left order, but
also left to right; in normal top to bottom order, but also
bottom to top. Because the commandments were carved completely
through the stone, they could be read both by Moses and those
facing him.
The Maharal says that each of the rabbis was correct: R.
Hananiah spoke of the tablets Moses hewed; others of the
perfection of the contents; R. Shimon and R. Simai stood in
different locations, and saw different patterns of carving. "Each
of these sages, one after the other, came to add perfection to
perfection, until the tablets were perfect and complete, as is
proper for a work of God."
Were the rabbis describing the perfection of God's work,
or were they perfecting it themselves? Which of the approaches to
the text were they using? Certainly that of tension and multiple
meaning, and this in respect to the very core of Torah. The
Maharal calls the tablets "the connection between God and man"
and as such, different in nature from the rest of Torah. The
tablets God made were perfect in this imagery, but not the ones
carved by Moses, the whole tablets in the ark. These, unlike
God's, differ depending on the viewpoint of the observer. This is
not stated, but is obviously the case, for otherwise, there was
no object in imagining the cubic tablets with each commandment
written eight times.
The question I approach is the key to my discussion here.
Why did God not instruct Moses to make an exact replica of the
tablets he shattered? The Maharal, in the pages cited, writes
that the original, God graven tablets, were "unsuitable for this
world...because when Israel received the Torah they were not at
the (spiritual) level of mankind, but at that of angels."
Therefore, the first tablets had to be broken and Israel had to
reach the status of man. Angels, we shall assume, or at least the
angels the rabbis had in mind, see everything the same way. There
is no individualism, no idiosyncrasy of interpretation among the
angels. Those uninterpretable tablets, those tablets for which no
hermeneutic was necessary, were shattered. This world's Torah is
this world's readings of Torah, and so we needed a Torah which
could be read. This is what Moses descended with after he broke
the first tablets, and we have been reading it many ways ever
since.
The rabbis seem always to have suspected that we could
never have dealt with the first tablets. In the sight of God's
writing, the hearing of God's words, all action would have been
commanded action. Who would not have responded to such commands,
issued without possibility of error? But what on earth would we
have had to think about, to talk about, other than the details of
obedience? Repeatedly we read that the commandment to study
Torah is the equivalent of all other commandments combined. God
Himself is pictured by the rabbis as learning Torah. And so, in
the Talmud (Menachot 98a-b), we read, "Resh Lakish said,
'sometimes (or 'often') ( or 'he often said') the rejection of
Torah is Torah's foundation, as it is written: (Exodus 34) Which
you broke. The Holy One said to Moses: Congratulations that you
broke them.'" Resh Lakish's words, in a shorter version, are
given also in Baba Batra 14b.
What we have so far is an acceptance - in the case of
Resh Lakish a glad acceptance - of the need for whole but human,
and therefore ambiguous, tablets. The ten commandments only are
acceptable, only make sense to us, if we can interpret and
misinterpret them. God's tablets are the same no matter how
viewed; humanity's, apparently so much simpler than God's, are
really difficult to make coherent sense out of.
Emmanuel Levinas, in an interview with Rainer Rochitz
(Conversations with French Philosophers, Humanities Press:
Highland Park, 1995, pp. 64-65) offers an example of the
difficulty. He says:
How are the ten commandments written on the two
tablets? That is, if you want to say it in German, a meschuggene,
a verruckte question. In a commentary from the first century
[centuries] after Christ, there are two interpretations of
question and answer. On the two tablets, the ten commandments are
written twice. Once on the one tablet and once on the other.
That's a possible answer! Naturally you don't have to interpret
the world of the ten commandments in a way that's always one and
the same. The ten commandments can form various worlds, which are
not exclusive, but which are different from one another. The
other opinion is that five are written on one tablet and five are
written on the other. Why? Because then you can't just read them
from top to bottom but also horizontally. And then you get: "I am
the eternal" and "Thou shalt not kill." We were in a monastery in
Holland and there I saw two tablets. On one tablet were written
three, and on the other seven commandments. The commandments
about God and the commandments about humans - separated from one
another! I said to my dear neighbor that I had seen the tablets
written differently. He asked why I criticized the three and the
seven. I told him my story of the two tablets: the "twice ten"
and the "five and five." I had great success!
The relationship Levinas wants between commandments that
connect people to God and those that connect people to people
does not exist independently of other relationships on the
tablets God made, but it always exists. On those tablets Moses
made, the relationship may or may not exist, as in the
monastery's version, or in that of the many people who
automatically read only top to bottom. But if it is found, it
exists powerfully in the mind of the finder, momentarily free of
other connections. This is the way the rabbis read Torah, in the
light of momentary relationships torn out of context and so given
power - at least the power of the violence of the tear.
The theme of shattering, of shattering which leads to new
readings, is ancient, if ancient matters. In Breshit Rabba
(38:13), an early compendium of rabbinical stories, we find the
fable known to all Jewish kindergartners of Abraham and his
father's idols. After examining them, and determining that they
are only stone, Abraham takes a stick and knocks them over,
breaking them. Abraham is shown as a child questioning the value
of idol worship, and ridiculing his father's gods because they
are powerless, or because they derive whatever power they have
from the people who worship them. In this parable, in order to
reach God, gods must be shattered, whereas in the shattering of
the tablets, what is shattered is truly divine. But the result is
similar: what was numerous becomes one. The philosophical
outcomes seem almost paradoxically opposite. Abraham moves from
the many facets of the immanent, which idol worship represents,
to the wholly transcendent unrepresentable God. Moses moves from
the apparent multiplicity of the divine - the single set of
commandments written eight times - to the unity of the immanent -
a single set of commandments. But this is misleading. The eight
times written commandments were identical from all perspectives,
while the single set, written five and five, are read differently
by every observer. Each account, that of Abraham and that of
Moses, is an account of the unity of the transcendent, compared
to the multiple readings of the immanent. The two midrashic
writings, that of Abraham and that which tells of the writing on
the tablets Moses shattered, may be taken as framing relations of
Judaism's coming to terms with a wholly transcendent, immanently
absent God. Hassidei Ashkenaz, a group of medieval pietists, held
the doctrine that the true Laws, the genuine Torah, existed only
with God, and that what we have been given is all we can read of
it.
What I am suggesting here is that it is not the Law, but
the shattering of the Law, which forms the connection between God
and humanity. Had God instructed Moses to duplicate the tablets
He had made, sooner or later the second set of tablets would also
have to be shattered. The idea of unity, which is the idea of
infinity, or eternity, is not a human idea, although we have
named it.
God, that is to say, is not in the tablets, nor is He in
the fragments of tablets. The fragments cannot exist for us in
any useful way, except as remembrance, memorial for, in Levinas'
frequently written phrase, "a trace of a past that never was." I
think that what Levinas means by "saying" in Otherwise than Being
(Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, 1974) is the sound of the
tablets breaking, or the murmuring of those staring at the
fragments, or remembering them, or talking about them. We never
did receive them. The tablets we did receive are multisemic, they
are impossible ever to put into propositional language, or into
anything even paraphrasable. The metaphor is of six hundred
thousand men, plus a corresponding number of women and children,
each with a different angle of vision, a different hearing. God
may be in the breaking, a breaking we carry out every time we
crack open a volume of Torah.
When we read Torah, the saying becomes, again in Levinas'
language, a "said." I will give two examples, both from my own
reading. The first is based on an occurance that takes place at
Mount Sinai.There is a strange passage in Exodus 24. Moses tells
the people, as so often in Torah, what God has told him,
replacing, with his human concept of the said, whatever had been
the experience of God's saying. But for the only time in Torah,
Moses uses the verb SPR (vayisaper) for "said" instead of the
otherwise constant DBR (vayidaber), usually rendered "spoke."
Later in the chapter, we read that Moses and the elders beheld
the floor under the divine throne. It is descibed as "livnat
sapir," translated as a "pavement of sapphire." But with the hint
of SPR earlier, the Hebrew could be rendered as "a construction
of saying." I knew, as the possible reading occured to me, that
I had broken the text, shattered it. Instead of the generally
accepted, but meaningless, vision of God seated on a throne set
on a paving of precious stones, I now had a vision of God as the
source of saying, surrounded by saying.
The second, less mystical example occured recently while
I was studying Mishna with my daughter. At the beginning of
Tractate Peah, the text reads: "These are the things which have
no set measure: The corner of the field left for the poor; the
first fruits brought to Jerusalem for the cohanim; appearances in
Jerusalem for the pilgrim festivals; acts of kindness to others;
and learning Torah. These are the things that a person is
rewarded for in this world, and yet will also be rewarded for
them in the world to come: honoring one's mother and father; acts
of kindness to others; bringing peace between people. And the
study of Torah is as if it were equal to all of these."
Idit, my daughter, pointed out to me that the Hebrew for
set measure, shiur, is also the word for lesson. Therefore, our
Mishna could be translated: "These are the things for which no
lesson is required." That is, the Mishna may say that these are
things which a person should know herself. Read, legitimately,
Idit's way, the Mishna is an altogether different "said." In both
cases, and in many others, the examples of Levinas' Talmudic
readings and the hermeneutic directions given by his
philosophical works have been of great help in hearing.
Reading these sacred texts, then, becomes a matter of
listening carefully for the instant of breaking, which happened
in Sinai, a desert where no location was definite, in a time
before time, or outside of time. The instant anything is heard,
it becomes a "said," a normal statement requiring the attention
we give any statement on a matter of importance. The "said" is
immanent and multiple, either one in a series of readings or one
of a group of simultaneous readings. For practical, that is
legal, purposes, the texts have an agreed meaning, or a set range
of agreed meanings, all based on the second set of tablets.
Behind the second tablets, though, in the shattered divine, are
the echoes of that breaking, echoes of the sound of the
shattering of God's words.
To part four of this essay
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