Dvar Torah on Parshat Yitro

This week's parsha, Yitro, contains the dramatic giving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. This event is prefaced by a dialogue which takes place between God and the Jewish people, mediated by Moshe, in which the Israelites agree to accept the Torah and thereby become God's treasured, holy nation. This is followed by God communicating the rest of the Torah to Israel: immediately after the theophany at Mount Sinai, during which basic ethical and theological principles are delineated, our parsha, and in fact the rest of the Torah, goes on to tell us how God, through Moshe, gave the people the details of all of the Torah's hundreds of Mitzvot.

After the people have accepted the offer to receive the Torah and thereby enter into a covenant with God, the presence of God was made manifest on the top of Mount Sinai, setting the stage for the divine communication of the commandments. The Torah prefaces the actual words of the Ten Commandments with a seemingly prosaic, and thoroughly predictable verse: "And God spoke all of these words, saying:" after which the actual Tan commandments begin - "I am the Lord your God..." etc., continuing until the end of the tenth commandment. Rashi has a fascinating comment about the apparently innocuous prefatory verse. He says:

"'And God spoke all of these words' teaches us that the Holy One Blessed be He said all ten commandments in one utterance, something which is impossible for a human to say. If this is the case, why does it again say 'I am [the Lord your God]' and 'Thou shalt not have [any other Gods before me]'? Because he repeated, and said explicitly, each and every commandment separately."

Rashi feels that the word "all" in the phrase "And God spoke all of these words, saying:" is unnecessary. The verse could just as well have read "And God spoke these words, saying:" and would have functioned just as successfully as the prefatory verse to the commandments. What is emphasized by the word "all"? Rashi's answer is remarkable. He posits a first, unintelligible, giving of the commandments - all the commandments, all at once. God, in one breath, with one sound, spoke all of the words of the Ten Commandments at once, something which, clearly, no human could articulate, or comprehend. Only after that supernatural speech does He repeat the commandments in a normal, word by word way; this second speaking of the commandments is recorded in the Torah as the Ten Commandments with which we are familiar, starting from "I am the Lord your God" and continuing through to the end of the entire Decalogue.

The obvious question is why would God do such a thing? Clearly, none of the people standing at Mount Sinai understood what was being said; all they heard was this garbled, inhuman, other-worldly noise. What purpose did this strange, divine communication serve?

One answer that immediately comes to mind is that it was precisely the divine, impossible, miraculous nature of the communication which was the point. In order to make it absolutely clear that it was God who was talking, He put on this little show of divinity, by speaking the dozens of words of the commandments all at once, making it clear to the listener that the speaker was, in fact, divine. This is OK as far as it goes. I wonder, however, why a people who just witnessed the ten plagues, the splitting of the sea, and were looking at the fireworks at the top of the mountain, needed this particular reminder of the divinity of their interlocutor? And if, for some reason, they did, why this method? Why not just a superhumanly loud word or noise? In fact, the Torah tells us that when God repeated the commandments, in their normal order, the Israelites clearly comprehended that it was God's voice they were hearing, and couldn't take it! Fearing they would die if they continued to hear God's voice, they asked Moshe to take over, and communicate the commandments to them in God's place. Clearly, the miraculous communication of all the commandments at once was not needed to make it clear that this really was God talking. Why, then, was it done? What is the message behind the specific divine trick of speaking many words - all the words of the Ten Commandments - at once?

I think that the decision by God to preface the giving of the Ten Commandments with this miraculous but unintelligible message, contains within it an important statement about the Torah itself. If this was, in fact, the way the Jewish people first heard the Torah - an inarticulate jumble of words followed by the step-by-step elucidation of those words, then, I would argue, they were being taught something specific about the Torah itself, about the way we come to understand it. The Torah is first experienced by man as an enigma, an impossible-to-navigate plethora of possibilities, both verbal and textual, which need to somehow be made sense of. God illustrates this by presenting us with an incomprehensible expression of the divine, which He then made approachable by arranging it as a text which we can begin to decipher. God Himself, rather than simply giving us the Torah as one would hand over an object, gave us, instead, a process, in which He Himself participates, by learning, as it were, the first, garbled version of the commandments, and only then presenting it to us a text which we can begin to grapple with.

The Torah was first given in an act of not-understanding/understanding, of confusion forged into clarity, teaching us that the Torah which we possess is not a static, unchanging, finished object, but is, rather, a process of deciphering, an ongoing attempt to explicate the divine will, begun by God Himself, into which, in an act of imitatio dei - imitation of God - we enter, with the knowledge that what we are doing is just one step in this journey of unraveling and elucidating a divine mystery.

One could argue that I am making too much of our role as interpreters of the Torah, and posit that the act of elucidation performed by God at Mount Sinai was a unique event, to be done by Him and Him alone. Perhaps once the Torah was written, all we can do is read it as it has been presented to us, and we do not have the right or obligation to engage in the task of clarification and interpretation as God did. Perhaps we do not have the right to imitate the God who interprets, and we need to be the people who listen, and obey. 

Nachmanides, also known as the Ramban (1194-1270), does not think so. In the preface to his commentary on the Torah, he clearly indicates that our Torah is not written in stone, so to speak, but is, rather, simply a step in this process of the unraveling, deciphering, and interpreting of the divine. He says - "And this, too, is a true tradition which we possess, that the entire Torah is made up of divine names, and that the words [of the Torah] can be divided up into divine names...and the entire Torah is like this...and it would seem that the [original, primordial] Torah was written thus: the writing was uninterrupted, with no division into words, and it was possible to read it as divine names, or to read it as we do, as the Torah and its commandments." The Ramban is telling us that the traditional way in which we read the Torah, the very division of the text into its words and verses, is only one option; the letters of the Torah can be divided up differently, and read as Divine names, or in other, perhaps infinite, permutations. This means that our Torah study is actually a continuation of the unraveling of the Torah which was begun by God himself, when He first pronounced the commandments as one jumbled-up whole, and then strung them out as words and sentences, inviting us to join Him, in our study of the Torah, in His effort to make sense of the divine word. We, in our learning of the Torah, are continuing this process of deciphering and unraveling, of attempting to forge meaning out of a divinely infinite number of possible meanings.

Shabbat Shalom

Rabbi Shimon Felix