“Carve for yourself two stone tablets like the first ones.” (10:1)
After the Jewish People heard the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai, Moses ascended the mountain again to receive the rest of the Torah. When he came down, he was greeted by the sight of the people worshipping the golden calf they had built. Moses smashed the two tablets of the Torah to the ground.
These first tablets were made by G-d and engraved by G-d. They contained all the Torah — Written and Oral — everything that was necessary to carry out the Creator’s instructions. For example, the first tablets included all the details of how to make tefillin: they must be perfectly square black boxes made from the hide of a kosher animal. Similarly, it was on these two tablets that G-d inscribed all the minutiae of the laws of Shabbos.
However, when G-d gave Moses the second tablets, they only contained the Written Torah. The detailed instructions, the Oral Torah, were given to him verbally.
The Torah recounts that when Moses came down to the people with the second tablets, his face was shining with a radiant corona. Why didn’t Moses’s face shine before? One would think that the second giving of the Torah was certainly less monumental than the giving of the first tablets, after which Moses’s face was apparently not shining. After all, the first tablets were written by G-d on rock hewn by G-d, whereas the second tablets were the work of man, and only the writing was Divine. It sounds like the first giving was a much greater one.
Really, the reverse is true. When G-d first gave the Torah, the Jewish People were to be the vessel that would contain the Torah. Like the Holy Ark, we would hold the Torah, but we would not be part of the Torah, just as a box only contains what is inside it. It’s not the thing itself.
But with the second tablets, the Jewish People became part of the Torah itself. The beams that radiated from Moses’s visage came from the light of the Oral Torah. G-d put into the mind of Moses — the rabbi, the teacher of Israel — the Oral Torah. All the verbal instructions that were originally written on the first tablets were now engraved only in the mind of Moses. Everything possible for a mortal understanding to achieve was written in the mind of Moses, to be taught to the Jewish People and transmitted throughout the generations.
Thus, the Jewish People became partners in the Torah. Our invitation to become partners in G-d’s Torah, to carry it around in ourselves, and to be part of the Torah itself, made the giving of the second tablets greater than the first. Thus, only after Moses’s mind became part of the tablets of Torah to receive the Oral Torah did his face shine with the radiance of the light of Torah.
RABBI YAAKOV NEUBURGER
RABBI ASHER SINCLAIR OHR.EDU
