AND GOD SAID TO MOSHE: I

SEE THIS PEOPLE –

AND HERE, IT IS A

HARD-NECKED PEOPLE!

SO

NOW, LET ME BE, THAT MY ANGER MAY FLARE AGAINST THEM

AND

I MAY DESTROY THEM –

BUT

YOU I WILL MAKE INTO A GREAT NATION!

MOSHE

IMPLORED THE LORD HIS GOD, HE SAID:

FOR

BROUGHT OUT OF THE LAND OF EGYPT WITH GREAT POWER, WITH A STRONG HAND…

AND

THE LORD RENOUNCED THE PUNISHMENT HE HAD PLANNED

TO BRING UPON HIS PEOPLE.

(Shemot 32:9-14)

"Va-yechal" – Illness, Forgiveness, or Desecration (The Hebrew word 'va-yechal' may be related to threee

different Hebrew words, each sharing at least two of the three root letters.)

"Va-yechal" – Said Rabbi El'azar: This teaches that

Moshe stood in prayer before The Holy One, Blessed Be He until He implored

him.  [Translated as per Rashi in Berachot

32a].

Rava said: [Moshe stood in prayer] until He annulled His

vow. It is written here "Va-yechal'[in the sense of desecrating]

and it says elsewhere (Bemidbar

30) "Lo ya-chel

devaro" – "He is not to desecrate his word". Said

the master: He may not annul – but other may annul for him.

Shmuel said: This teaches us that he was prepared to die on

their behalf  [The Hebrew for one

killed is "chalal"], as is written "And if not,

expunge me from Your book".

Said Rava in the name of Rabbi Yitzchak: This teaches that

he applied to the them [The Hebrew 'l'hachil' means to apply] the

quality of mercy.

And our Sages said: This teaches that Moshe said to The Holy

One, Blessed Be He: Master of the Universe, it would be a desecration for you

to do such a thing.

(Bavli,

Berachot 31a)

THE COVENANT OF SINAI

AND THE COVENANT

IN THE CLEFT OF THE

ROCK

Jonathan

Chipman

To

Professor Jacob Milgrom,

on the

occasion of his eightieth birthday

In his introduction to the volume on the

Book of Numbers in the New JPS Torah Commentary, Jacob Milgrom (citing the work

of Newing) refers to the structure of the Hextateuch-the Five Books of the

Torah plus the Book of Joshua-as a "grand introversion."  That is, an expanded version of the

"chiasm," or ABB'A'pattern, in which two elements are crossed in

inverse order.  Here, there are a

series of paired incidents or subjects, throughout the length of these six

books, arranged symmetrically around a central point, like an ascending

pyramid.  This structure creates a

sense of balance, suggesting a certain schema moving, first "from

slavery," and then "to freedom," and focusing attention on the

central point in the schema.  What

is striking for our purposes is that, viewed through this prisim, the center or

focus of the entire Torah (plus Joshua) is the theophany to Moses in the cleft

of the rock in Parshat Ki Tisa.What is it about this scene that could convey it

such crucial importance?

On one level, the dialogue between Moses

and God recorded in Exodus 33 may be read as a discussion of the limits of

human religious knowledge.  The

story of the Golden Calf is familiar; 

after intervening with God to fully forgive the people, Moses makes two

requests.  First,  "make known to me Your ways"

(33:13)- that is, show Your involvement with the people in your covenantal name

of HVYH by accompanying them "personally."Second, Moses desires a

personal epiphany of God's essence: "show me your glory"

(33:18).  Not merely

"knowledge," but "seeing";  not only "your ways," but also "your

glory."  God accedes to this

request only in part.  Regarding the

former, He states:  "I will

let all my goodness pass before you, and will call upon the name of the Lord

before you, and I shall be gracious to whom I am gracious, and merciful to whom

I am merciful,"  but then

immediately adds, lest Moses think that there is to be a full epiphany of the

Divine glory, that "you may not see my face, for no man may see me and

live" (vv. 19-20).  But then,

in a kind of compromise, He adds: 

"When my glory passes by, I shall place you in the cleft of the

rock, and you shall see my back, but my face you shall not see."  Moses is not granted the mystic vision

of the secret of God's "face" or the "glory" of God as He

is "in Himself."  He is

only allowed a glimpse, of a strictly limited type.  The Talmud states, rather arcanely, that Moses was only

allowed to see "the knot of God's tefillin." 

What Moses is given is

a kind of moralistic epiphany: 

knowledge concerning the nature of God's behavior, and especially His

quality of forgiveness, writ large in the "thirteen qualities of

mercy" that are presented in the next chapter (34:6-7).  It would seem that one is meant to draw

from this a spiritually austere, "Lithuanian," anti-mystical

message:the proper concern of the religious human being is not knowledge of God

Himself, but of His ways-His ethical qualities, His capacity for forgiveness

and mercy and compassion.  The

first rule of religious ethics is imitatio dio, "imitation of

God."  Our interest in the

nature of God is not aimed at mystical, esoteric knowledge, but at ethics:  we desire knowledge of God so as to

imitate his ethical way in our own lives, here on this earth.  A noble, humanistic sort of message.

But there is something

more here.  The mystical vision is

limited, not only because man's proper place is with the ethical, but because

God is ineffable, transcendent, frightening;  because this is all that man can perceive-in any event,

without dying or going insane (compare "the four who entered Pardes"

in Hagiggah Ch. 2).

The

Golden Calf:  Sin and Forgiveness

The epiphany at the Cleft of the Rock

needs to be understood within the context of Het ha-Egel, the sin of the

Golden Calf.  This event has a

powerful resonance in Jewish thought, be it in Midrash, in traditional

exegesis, or in the Musar and Derush (ethical-homiletical) literature.One might

even say that it occupies a place in Jewish mythology roughly corresponding to

that of Original Sin in Christian doctrine.  The difference is, of course, that the sin of the Calf is

not an individual one, but The Sin, with capital letters, of the Jewish people

as a whole, betraying the Sinai covenant only weeks after it is made.  The figure that constantly recurs in

this context is that of the unfaithful wife:  the smashing of the tablets is, in one widespread reading,

the tearing up of the marriage document -either in anger, or in a quick-witted

move by Moses to diminish the people's culpability.

Interestingly, in much of the discussion

of the sin of the Golden Calf among midrashic authors and medieval exegetes,

there is a strong tendency to say that the sin was not "real"

idolatry, but something else of lesser severity:  perhaps a misunderstanding or misapprehension on the part of

the people, either of the situation 

or of what the Torah required of them.Perhaps we can understand it in

the following way:When God gave the Torah to the people through Moses, He

expected them to keep it with loyalty and devotion and love and enthusiasm, as

dedicated servants, former slaves who knew they owed everything to their Divine

liberator.  Perhaps He even expected

commitment to the highest, most sublime level of religious awareness and

consciousness.

But what God didn't bargain for is that

the people were… well, people. 

Their "true" concerns were the ordinary, mundane stuff of

life:  getting up in the morning

and knowing that they have something to eat, both for themselves and for their

women and children;  shelter, to

protect them from the freezing cold of the desert night and from the blazing

heat of the midday sun;  security,

from wild beasts and snakes and other people;  to occasionally lie with a woman and otherwise have a good

time-perhaps to get up and dance and sing, or to sit around the campfire

telling stories… So it was with them, and so it is, for all our vaunted

modernity and technology and "21^st century," with us

today.

Into all this came Moses with his God and

His revelation.  The people saw the

thunder and lightning and experienced something overwhelming-but exactly what

that something was they might be hard put to explain, exactly.  They were, in fact, so overwhelmed that

each time they heard God's voice they "jumped backwards" twelve mil-twelve

kilometers.  And after the first

two commandments they said, "you speak with Him, for otherwise we will

die-and afterwards you can tell us what he said" (based on 20:16).  The true, full revelation was

essentially to Moses, who quickly assumed the role of intercessor (thus

Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed, II.33, albeit

expressed rather more elegantly). 

To the people, the identity of God and of Moses were all muddled

together in a vague sense of awe and reverence and holiness-of the presence of

the numinous-which translated itself into what was considered sacred.

Is it not always thus

with holy men, with prophets, with those blessed with mantic powers?  Pay a visit to the grave of the Baba

Sali in Netivot, or to Meron on Lag ba-Omer, or think about the ubiquitous

photographs of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe or other tzaddikim-and reflect how

easily pious, Orthodox Jews cross the boundary from reverence, to outright

adulation and near-worship of a mortal human being.  Popular religious sentiment can be fickle, but deeply

emotional.  Moses was the beloved

leader, who had given them the courage to break away from the bonds of Egypt in

the first place;  to defy their

slave-masters by tying up the lambs next to their doors for four days, then

instructing them to slaughter them and sprinkle the blood on the doors and not

to be afraid;  to pack all their

belongings, with the kneaded matza cakes on their shoulders, and to simply walk

away from Egypt.  And he too was

the central figure on that great and awesome day in the desert when they heard

God's voice, and it was he who sat there to interpret

it for them.  So when, as the Torah

tells us, "Moses tarried to return":  he didn't come back when they expected him-perhaps, one

midrash says, by only a few hours, and no doubt due to a faulty calculation on

their part-they started to worry. 

"For this man Moses, we don't know what is become of him"

(32:1, 23). 

This being the case, they needed someone

or something else-not so much to teach them or to guide them, as to symbolize

the presence of what they had come to think of as the Divine.  It is clear from the text that the mood

in the camp was one of total confusion. 

Note Aaron's words:  "I

took the gold and threw it into the fire, and out came this calf"

(32:24).  No one seems to have

shaped it;  it wasn't the result of

any premeditated plan;  it just

happened.  To change our terms of

reference, we can imagine something like that happening at an orgiastic party

where everybody was stoned-on drugs, on drink, on the rhythm of the music, from

the motion and dancing and the sense of breaking away from everyday

routine.  "These are neither

shouts of victory, nor cries of defeat, but sounds of 'answering'[or:

singing]" (v. 18)-that is, a hubbub of totally undisciplined voices. 

Into this fray, Moses brings a simple

message to God.  "Give them

another chance;  forgive them.  That's just how people are-fickle,

easily disappointed, easily prone to following their basest emotions in a

crisis, especially if there is no strong leader around."  It is interesting that the conventional

image of Moses in Western [i.e., Christian] art is of an angry, stern,

unbending leader, who hurls the tablets to the ground in a fit of fury and

rage.  By contrast, the Midrash

paints Moses as a tender, loving, fatherly figure, who stops at nothing to

convince God to repent;  indeed, it

devotes two lengthy chapters (Exodus Rabbah 43-44) to the arguments put

forward by Moses in this attempt at persuasion.

This returns us

to our original question.  What

kind of lesson of compassion does God give Moses when he "reveals"

the thirteen attributes of mercy? 

Moses already knew full well the supreme value of compassion, of mercy,

forgiveness, etc.  Perhaps, indeed,

the chapter needs to be read differently. 

God is simply proclaiming to Moses "for the record"-for future

generations, and for the present-the fact that He relents of His fierce anger,

and that Moses was right all along.

The

Revelation of Shavuot and the Revelation of Yom Kippur

Let us return to the very beginning:  to the story of the Flood and the

verses that frame it in Genesis 

6:5 and 8:21.  Originally,

God saw mankind as utterly perverse, degenerate and generally no good:  "all the impulses of the thoughts

of his heart are only evil all the day."  After the Flood, and Noah's offer of sacrifices, God somehow

relented.  Something tender inside

Him, as-it-were, was moved:  He saw

people as frail, weak, almost child-like: 

"for the impulse of man's heart is evil from his youth."  Therefore, he concludes, it is not

fitting to wipe him out;  rather,

He must find another way for dealing with the weakness and flaws in humankind's

character.In our chapter, too, God starts out filled with anger.  Having made a covenant with his chosen

people, with the descendants of his beloved followers, the three patriarchs,

each one of whom was a truly remarkable moral and spiritual figure, it seemed

only right that their great-great-grandchildren be held to the same high

standard.  Yet things didn't work

out that way.  Somehow, through the

dialogue with Moses, God came to see things differently.  As Buber once said, all knowledge is

dialogic:  that a person can only

learn, can only break out of his own ingrained patterns of thinking and

reacting, through a situation of dialogue, of speaking to and interacting with

the other.  The radical message

here is that even God, so to speak, only learns dialogically.  Through dealing with the sin of the

Golden Calf, and with the dialogue with Moses that ensued, He realized that He

needed to change the rules of his interactions with the Jewish people (and

presumably, by extension, with mankind generally).

There is, of course, a

major, profound problem here for those who believe in a Maimonidean,

Aristotelian God, unchanged and unchangeable, the embodiment of eternal

perfection, etc.  But the biblical

and/or midrashic God is quite different, clearly possessing a personality and

the ability to change and, if one can dare to say such a thing, to grow.  But all that is another discussion.

In conclusion:  the Torah relates two revelations, two kinds of

theophany:  that of Shavuot, and

that of Yom Kippur.  (There is a

well-known Rabbinic tradition that the scene in the cleft of the rock took

place on Yom Kippur:  the first 40

days from Shavuot ended with the smashing of the tablets on the 17^th

of Tammuz;  the next 40 days, of

Moses'beseeching forgiveness, ended on Rosh Hodesh Ellul;  a third group of 40 days, during which

he received the Torah a second time, ends on Yom Kippur).  The revelation of Shavuot is one of

sternness, of apodictic, unconditional commands, given with the name Elohim,

leaving no room for human failure. 

By contarst, the revelation of Yom Kippur is one of love, mercy,

compassion, and forgiveness, rooted in the sacred name HVYH:  that there is room in the world for

both man and God to change and repent of their former ways.  The location of Exodus 33 in Milgrom's

"grand introversion" suggests that the latter revelation is the

greater one.

Rabbi Jonathan Chipman is a translator by

profession, and a scholar in Jewish studies.  He writes a weekly sheet (in English) on the portion of the

week and the Haftara, titled "Hitsei Yehonatan".  (Anyone interested in ordering a

sample of subscription can write via email to: yonarand@internet-zahav.net.) 

The

Considerate "Powerful Hand" of Moshe

Rabbi Meir said: Moshe did not break the tablets [of his own

volition] , but was directed to do so by the All Powerful, as is written "Asher

shibarta" [Literally "which you broke"- K.G.]:

power to you") for having broken them.

(Avot

d'Rabbi Natan, 2:3)

When Moshe saw how they had sinned by making the calf, he

said: How can I give them the tablets? I will be obligating them to observe

serious mitzvot and I will be condemning them to death by divine power,

for it is inscribed upon them "You shall have no other gods before

Me". He turned to go back. Seventy elders saw him, and ran after him;

he held the top of the tablet, and they held the top of the tablet. Moshe was

stronger than all of them, as is written (Devarim 34): "And in all the strong hand and in all the great,

awe-inspiring acts that Moshe did before the eyes of all Israel."

(Aboth

D'Rabbi Natan 2:3)

The Revelation at Sinai

and the Sin of the Calf

Is it possible that the Children of Israel – only forty days

after the Revelation at Sinai, while the words  "I am"  and "You shall have no gods" still echo in

their ears – are seeking other gods?!

It appears that the Torah wished to teach us, by presenting

a number of examples, that indeed, such things can occur. The assumption

that people who stood at the foot of Mt. Sinai are incapable of of again

sinking into ignorance, into foolishness, into the abomination of idolatry –

such an assumption is basically fallacious…

Overt miracles – one-time wondrous happenings – do not

change a person, his personality, his habits. They may strongly impress him

temporarily, but they do not cut him off from his world, his accomplishments,

his past, his liftime habits.

(From

Studies In The Book Of Shemot, Nechama Leibowitz z'l)

Editorial

Board: Pinchas Leiser (Editor), Miriam Fine (Coordinator), Itzhak

Frankenthal and Dr. Menachem Klein

Translation:

Kadish Goldberg

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