Timeless Torah

Although G-d said to Moshe, “Carve out for yourself two tablets just like the first ones,” they weren’t actually exact duplicates. There were several differences. The first set of Ten Commandments had not only been inscribed by G-d, but the Tablets themselves had been carved out by His hand as well. The replacement tablets, while written by Hashem, were carved by Moshe.

How much of a difference did this make? The contrast was as great as that which existed between the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words, all the difference in the world!

This is because G-d’s making of the First Tablets represented their having emanated from a source outside the realm of evil. Embodied in these tablets was the Hidden Light of creation, which shone briefly during the six days of creation, and then was concealed again after Adam ate from the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. Bringing the First Tablets down from heaven basically returned this supernal light to our physical domain. When these tablets were ultimately broken because of the sin of the golden calf, the light returned to its spiritual hiding place.

While it is true that Moshe’s subsequent pleas on behalf of the Jewish nation were enough to avoid Divine annihilation, it was not capable of bringing back the First Tablets and the light revealed through them. Instead, new tablets were created from the physical world itself, tablets which could not shine with this holy light, and therefore were not above the world of evil. For this reason, the Second Tablets were considered to be on the level of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In fact, had the Jewish people not transgressed with the Golden Calf, all of creation would have been elevated back to the level it had been before Adam transgressed. Torah would then have been revealed on the most sublime level. What the tragedy of the Golden Calf resulted in was a Torah that does not directly reveal its Divine wisdom, demanding instead that we labor intellectually to comprehend and retain its secrets.

This difference was also alluded to by the fact that the First Tablets contained 17 less words than the Second Tablets. This can be understood to mean that as a result of the Golden Calf and the ensuing “physicalization” of the Jewish nation: it took more words to express the same lofty concepts found in the First Tablets. As a result, we are forced to exert more energy to draw out the mysteries of Torah. Furthermore, says the Kabbalistic commentary, Pri Tzaddik, the number 17 is also the gematria of the Hebrew world tov, (meaning good) which is first mentioned in Genesis when referring to the Hidden Light of creation.

What does this mean? It teaches us that even though the tablets that Moshe fashioned started us off much lower spiritually, there is a connection, albeit a tenuous one, to the light of the First Tablets. This is why the Sages of the Talmud could state with confidence in Ethics of our Fathers, “The Tablets were the work of G-d and the writing was that of G-d.”

Clearly this statement made by Rabbis who lived centuries after the second set of (Moshe’s) Tablets refers to the ones carved by the Hand of the Almighty. So what possible relevance does this post-Second Temple teaching have to us who only retained the second set?

The answer is, the Second Tablets were unfortunately not a replica or replacement for the First Tablets. Nonetheless they were at least a medium through which to access the original tablets. Just as seeing glasses act as a corrective device for one whose vision has become impaired, so too did the Second Tablets act as a corrective device to help us recover what was lost when Moshe broke the First Tablets.

And this is precisely what we try to achieve every time we sit down to learn Torah.