Timeless Torah

After all of the hoopla of the big production, which we call the Decalogue, one man climbed the mountain…Up there, far from prying eyes, Moses studied. Exactly what he studies, we are not told. However, what his menu was is recorded for posterity. “Forty days and forty nights, bread he did not eat and water he did not drink.” Ever thought of trying it?

Imagine you are attempting to solve a problem when suddenly you jump up and exclaim, “I have it! I have the answer!” Everyone asks, “What is it?” You brush them off murmuring, “Sh! Sh!...” You don’t want to talk. You close your eyes and signal with your hands for them not to disturb you. But how can they disturb you by asking you for your brilliant answer?
But they can. While you know that you have the solution, you can’t (yet) explain it to anyone. You have to think about it. You don’t even know yourself how it explains the question. All you know is that you have the answer, and if those people don’t stop bothering you, you’ll forget it. Why? The insight is still too intense to be completely understood. It is like a bolt of lightning, a bright and intense flash that can disappear if not given the proper attention. (It’s no accident that a new idea is symbolized by a light bulb suddenly being turned on.)
Yet in this flash of intellectual epiphany lies the answer to the problem at hand; that is certain. You can feel it. How it solves the problem is not yet consciously known, but given the undisturbed time to contemplate this bright and powerful idea, we can relate it to the problem at hand. Eventually the details will emerge as the brightness, intensity and the sheer adrenaline dissipates.
First we conceive new ideas, and then we understand what it was that we conceived. One conceptual flash may provide the key to many related, and even non-related, problems. But at the time of conception, when you shouted, “Eureka,” the future details of all this intellectual content were completely outshone by the brilliance of the initial concept. Yet they were there.
All knowledge, in all its details, be it mathematics, philosophy, physics, psychology, geology, or anatomy, comes from one perfectly pure and abstract, inconceivably intense and bright, inhumanly all-encompassing and self-complete, spark of conceptual light. No human can reach this spark of all-truths on his or her own. But while it may be humanly impossible to acquire the one single intellectual truth that holds in it all existing (past, present, and future) knowledge, it can be bequeathed as a gift from G-d, the ultimate possessor of that one single pure kernel of wisdom. Indeed, this is what was given to Moses as he stood at the top of Mount Sinai.
The absent-minded professor is well known to all of us. He misses his train stop, forgets where he parked his car, loses his coat, forgets to eat lunch, etc: All because he is so deeply involved in thinking. A new idea occurs to him half an hour before lunch, and he doesn’t even realize that four hours have passed while he was theorizing. The absent-minded professor is familiar to all of us because we often see him in ourselves. It is human nature that when we are struck by the lightning of intellectual conception, we become so absorbed that we forget our surroundings.
This brilliance of intellectual inspiration can also give us a new surge of physical energy, even when we are most tired and hungry. Not to mention that time, in such instances, often passes completely unnoticed. Imagine being given the most pure and sophisticated concept, that one all-encompassing spark. Surely this would be the experience of experiences.
Time would not exist for the duration of that experience. Food and physical matters would never enter his mind. For this injection of ULTIMATE WISDOM, with its inspirational surge, would provide more than enough energy for life. It could take days of a continuous trance for a human to accept this pure flash of knowledge, but after it was over, this human could recall it as a split-second-experience that had not drained him of either time or energy.
And so it was with Moses. Had we been there to ask him why he was on the mountain so long, he might well have replied, “Long? I was only up there for a couple of seconds!”
This spark of all-truths is the essence of Torah. This Moses received on Mount Sinai. No wonder that, “For forty days... he did not eat and... he did not drink.”