Hi friends! Welcome to Talmud Daily. I am so excited to continue this tour of the entirety of the Talmud with just 10 minutes a day every single day. Yesterday we introduced the concept of avos and imahos, mothers and fathers, and the formation of the eternal Jewish nation. Today I want to build the deeper meaning of where the Torah fits into all of this.
Essentially, we have Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov, and Yaakov has the 12 tribes. This is the ending of Genesis where we have the family of the Jewish people that are now descending into Egypt, and it’s in Egypt that the Jewish people, the descendants of the 12 tribes, are now enslaved. We know the story of redemption from Egypt because we retell it every single year on Passover, on Pesach. This is the story of the Haggadah.
The reason why this is such a transformational and foundational story is because it is the story of the formation of the eternal Jewish people. It is right after they leave Egypt, they’re chased out by the Egyptians, the sea is split before them, and they finally come to encamp on Mount Sinai. And on Mount Sinai they are given the first mass revelation of God to the Jewish people. Where God, so to speak, literally talks to the Jewish people. Where they are exposed or revealed to the voice of God in this world. The purpose of life. The purpose of existence itself. That there is a God in this world.
And something very interesting happens at Mount Sinai. Moshe is the teacher of Torah. You may be familiar with the name Moses. We’ll call him Moshe. That’s how he’s referred to in the Torah. And Moshe goes up to be the deliverer and the original teacher of Torah to the Jewish people.
What is the purpose of this Torah and why are they now going to Mount Sinai? The purpose of Torah is that, as we spoke about earlier, the Jewish people are the canvas in which we sanctify life itself. How do we sanctify? What is the painting that we are supposed to project out into the world? That is the world of Torah.
And when God first speaks to the Jewish people, the way the Talmud and the Torah describes it, is the Jewish people, their souls literally leap up from their body. You can imagine how jarring it is, and this has been depicted in films and in non-fiction. There’s this great show called The Three-Body Problem, I think that’s what it’s called, and there’s this scene where the sky starts to blink. You can imagine, there’s a movie out now by Steven Spielberg called Disclosure [Day], where we finally realize that there are aliens in this world, and it upends all of society and all of the world.
This in a way is what happens to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai. When we have that very stark revelation where God is now speaking to the Jewish people, it is not only terrifying and is described that way. It’s hard to have a sense of self. If we come into contact with the author, it is hard to feel any sense of self. Kurt Vonnegut had a book called Breakfast of Champions, and I believe, at the very end of that book, there’s this incredible scene where a character in the book meets the author, meets Kurt Vonnegut. And he’s sitting in a bar, and he feels this sense of dread, and he finally realizes, “Oh my gosh, I am just a creation.”
This is what initially happens at Sinai. When God reveals himself at Sinai, the Jewish people almost lose their collective sense of self. They literally need to be revived because it is so awesome and so tremendous that we are just creations. There is a purpose to the world that transcends all of us. There is a reason why we exist. That is God, and the first step towards understanding God is realizing that we are creations. And that can be a very frightening thing because we spend so much of our lives kind of in our own heads, in our own consciousness, and to step out and realize there’s something that transcends it, there’s something that transcends self, there’s something that transcends the way that we look at the world, is very jarring.
The Jewish people, they’re revived, and Moshe now goes up for 40 days and 40 nights to learn the entirety of the Torah to then teach it to them. God has already revealed the Ten Commandments but now Moshe is going up to Sinai to learn the entirety of the Torah. It is during this time that we have a foundational story, absolutely foundational, and that is the story of the golden calf. It is when Moshe is up there for 40 days and 40 nights that the Jewish people, they start to look at their watch and they say, “Shouldn’t he be back already by now? Shouldn’t our teacher, the greatest prophet to ever live, the prophet who literally is going to transmit the entirety of the [Torah]. Where is he?” And he’s late—they miscalculate the times.
The way the Torah talks about this, and this is in the thirty-second chapter in the book of Exodus and Parshas Ki Tisa: Moshe goes up to the mountain and it says that the people saw ki boshesh Moshe, that Moshe was delayed, he was late to come down from the mountain, and they start to get nervous. “What should we do?” So they go ahead and they ask Moshe’s brother Aaron, and they say, “We’re going to build a golden calf.” We’re going to build this calf that is representative of that needing, that farming, and that [need] to be cared for. This is how the Jewish people felt in that moment. We’re just this young [people]and we need something beautiful and spectacular to represent for us what we’re now missing with Moshe.
When Moshe comes down and he sees the Jewish people literally all dancing around this golden calf, he takes that first set of the Ten Commandments and he breaks it. And it’s the shards of breaking that—that literally is the closing words of the Torah, when we’re literally at the very end of the Torah and trying to describe Moshe. The greatness of Moshe is that he was willing to break that first set of tablets.
Why is this so foundational? Moshe then goes back up the mountain again for 40days and 40nights and comes down with a second set of tablets. This is described also in the Torah. If you look in Deuteronomy and, right in the beginning over there, we’re told the story of getting the second set in [Parshas] Va’eschanan, which is like chapter four and five. You can look over there. And Moshe now gets a second set of tablets. What happened here? You have a first set, then the golden calf, and then the second set.
This is where the birth of the Oral Law, this is where the birth of the partnership that represents the Talmud and Talmudic thinking, begins—in this very story.
The Talmud in Gittin, which is the tractate that talks about divorce, we will of course get to it, says, based on the verse in the story of the golden calf, that when God gives Moshe this second set of tablets, he says, “This you’re going to have to build through your spoken word.” And it is over there that the Talmud says, that in this story of the golden calf, God is reminding the Jewish people the ultimate covenant that he has created with the Jewish people is with the interpretive collective powers of the Jewish people in developing Torah itself. The lesson of the broken set of first tablets is that we cannot be reliant exclusively on a prophetic teacher. We can’t be reliant exclusively on revelation.
Once we have revelation, once we have the fixed words of the Torah, we now need a partnership and a covenant where our interpretation throughout the generations literally build and create that partnership between the Jewish people and God throughout all generations. It’s the story of the golden calf and the shards of that first set of tablets that we take almost all of those shards, and we start to reconstruct them on our own. And now we rebuild through our interpretation, through our work, through our commitment, through our creativity. Now Torah isn’t just about revelation, it’s about a partnership. And the story of the golden calf, the story of Moses breaking that first set of tablets, is the birth of this distinction between a fixed Written Torah and an Oral Torah that is unfolding over time.
It is the Torah, that is the Oral Torah, that’s our interpretation, our creativity, our wrestling with the text itself, that becomes the bedrock of the covenant between the Jewish people and God.
Thank you so much for listening to Talmud Daily. I am so excited to continue this journey with you. Thank you so much for listening and let’s keep making Torah sweet.