At that time, the Lord said to me, "Hew for yourself two stone tablets like the first ones and come up to Me onto the mountain..."
The Sages, always sensitive to nuance, focus on the word "for yourself" (“lecha”), which seems superfluous and even misleading, as though these tablets were being carved for Moses himself. The verse could have stated, “Carve two stone Tablets.” What does it mean “Carve for yourself?”
The Talmud deduces from this that Moses was permitted to keep the chips of the second Tablets, hewed from sapphire. As Moses hewed the stone into two tablets, all the left over chips became his. Indeed, the word in Hebrew for “hew,” pesol, also means the leftover chips, the refuse (pesoles). This, says the Talmud, transformed Moses into a very wealthy man.
The following powerful insight is of the Rebbe Rashab: The second Tablets differed drastically from the first. As the Torah relates, the first Tablets were created by G-d himself, while the second were hewed by a human being—Moses. He is the one who carved out the stone into Tablets; only then did G-d inscribe on them the Ten Commandments.
This reflected the difference within the Jewish people before and after the creation and worship of the Golden Calf: Initially, the Israelites were heavenly, pristine, and sacred, hence they were capable of receiving Heavenly Tablets, crafted in Heaven. After they tasted sin and endured spiritual failure, they could only receive the second set of Tablets which were man-made, and were inferior to the first. In the process of failure and rehabilitation, we confront our darkness, weakness and vulnerability. We are no longer a clean slate of heaven; instead, we have much “pesoles,” refuse, sediments, and filth to deal with.
The Torah teaches us a powerful lesson in life: It is from the “chips” of the second Tablets that Moses acquired his greatest wealth. The first Tablets had no “chips,” no refuse and waste. Heaven knows not the pain of failure, filth of promiscuity, the abyss of addiction. The Second Tablets, in contrast, had many chips. They represented our confrontation with addiction, shame, and deception. Moses was a “wealthy” man. But his true wealth came only from the second Tablets—from the light and truth that is generated when we confront our darkness and we transform it into light, when we gaze at our “chips” and we turn them into Divine Tablets. It is from the confrontation with our inner gravel and trauma that we discover our profoundest richness and our deepest truths. It is when we can look at our proclivity to depression, despair, and capitulation, and use it as a springboard for awareness, that we grow to discover an inner wealth not available in the heavenly, pure and holy first Tablets given by Hashem Himself to pure and innocent people.
Despite the unparalleled richness of Moses’ soul, his deepest richness came from dealing with the “pesoles,” with the refuse, sediments and gravel of his people. This is the wisdom and depth that emerges from life's "dirt" and grime, from amid struggle and inner strife.
As growing human beings, we must never run from our inner refuse, and from the refuse we see in others. Like Moses, our truest wealth will come when we discover and extract the sparks hidden in the “chips” of the human being.
Rabbi YY Jacobson
