The Bible relates that when Moses presented the covenant before the Israelites, they responded, "We will do and we will listen" (Exodus 24:7). This expression has always been a source of wonderment and surprise to rabbis and a refutation of the anti-Semitic portrayal of Jews as calculating and self-protective. "We will do and we will listen" implies a commitment to observe the covenant even before the Jews heard its details and understood its ramifications.
The Talmud (Shabbos 88b) tells a story about a Sadducee who once saw Rava, one of the great Talmudic sages, so engrossed in learning that he did not attend to a wound in his own hand. The Sadducee exclaimed, "You rash people! You put your mouths ahead of your ears [by saying 'We will do and we will listen'], and you still persist in your recklessness. First, you should have heard [the covenant details]. If it is within your capacity, then accept it. If not, you should have rejected it!”
His argument was logical. Imagine someone offers you to invest a large sum of money in a developing company. To respond, “Sure, here is the money, and then afterward I will listen to the details,” is ridiculous. If you do not know what the company is all about, why subject your money to possible loss? And yet, in this case, the Jews declared that they were ready to embrace a life-altering covenant, even before they heard all the details and knew what Judaism was all about! Why? How?
Rava answered the Sadducee with these words: "We walked [into it] with our whole being.”
What Rava meant was this: By definition, a relationship with G-d cannot be created on our terms; it must be on His terms. If there is something called Truth, if there is something called Reality, we cannot define it; it must define us. We cannot accept it on condition that it suits our senses and expectations. On the contrary, we must realign our condition to it. Once the Jewish people knew that G-d was communicating with them, they did not want to fit religion into their imagination; they had no preconditions for a relationship with truth. It was in the desert that the Jews could declare, “We will do and we will listen.”
This process must occur each year anew. To receive Torah, we must have the courage to walk into a desert; we must strip ourselves of any pre-defined self-identity. We need to be ready to hear the sound beneath the sounds we are accustomed to. Torah is not merely a cute and endearing document filled with rituals to satisfy nostalgia or tradition. Torah demands that we open ourselves up with our whole being and declare, “We shall do and we shall listen!"
