EMOR: Carrying Two Tablets

The Epic Balancing Act

As we speak, we are zooming day by day from leaving Egypt towards the holiday of Shavuot, the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, where over 2 million of our great great great great grandparents awaited with trepidation for Moshe's descent from the mountain with the 10 Commandments in hand...

...when Moshe finally came down, he was carrying two tablets...

Now, this may be just too obvious a question for your taste, but we'll go ahead and ask it anyways:

Would it have been too difficult to fit all 10 commandments on one tablet???  Maybe it would have been too heavy...  Maybe G!d could have written smaller!  There were plenty of other options -- why 2 tablets!?!

We have to really think about this.  The Alm!ghty clearly wanted us to see Moshe coming down from the mountain with two separate tablets in hand!  This was the first impression Hashem wanted leave on us.  Why!?!

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It's well known, and we've actually discussed it before, the two tablets are divided in two to separate between the mitzvot between man and Hashem (on the right), and the mitzvot between man and his fellow man (on the left).  A superficial reading of this idea will just look at it as a convenient method of organization, but let's try to digest it properly...

The midrash in Shemot Rabba helps us see the following passuk with infrared vision:

וַיִּתֵּן אֶל מֹשֶׁה כְּכַלֹּתוֹ לְדַבֵּר אִתּוֹ בְּהַר סִינַי שְׁנֵי לֻחֹת הָעֵדֻת לֻחֹת אֶבֶן 

כְּתֻבִים בְּאֶצְבַּע אֱלֹקים

[Hashem] gave to Moshe when He finished speaking to him on Har Sinai the two tablets of the testimony -- stone tablet(s) written by the finger of G!d (Shemot 31:18).

Our Sages draw our attention to the way "tablets" is written in Hebrew "לוחת" as if it were referring to a single tablet, "לוחת אחת."  The midrash explains that the Torah here is communicating that the two tablets are inseparably unified and equivalent, with neither greater or lesser than the other (Shemot Rabba 41:8).  

While we may have previously thought that with this, the rabbis wanted to share with us some inane piece of stone masonry trivia, we can now see that that they are expressing the key to answering our original question.

Contrary to popular belief, the mitzvot between man & G!d and those between man & man are equally important.  

I will just repeat this last line for effect: the mitzvot between man & G!d and those between man & man are equally important (Pachad Yitzhak, Shavuot 41).  

Some people could think they are being "frum" due to the fervor of their service to G!d, yet step on G!d's creatures in the process.  Other people may think of themselves as "humanists," but in leaving G!d out of the picture, they're entirely missing the immense proportions of what being human is all about.

Thus, we find ourselves in the middle of quite a complex map.  We have to relate to Hashem.  We have to relate to other people.  And we cannot forget about ourselves!  Just like there are three dimensions in space, there are three dimensions of relationship (man-G!d, man-man, man-himself).  

Life is not as simple as we'd often like to make it seem.  As it says in Pirkei Avot:

Shimon haTsaddik was from the remaining members of the Great Assembly.  He would [always] say, 

"The world stands on three things: 

      on the Torah (our relationship to ourselves), 

          on the [Divine] Service (our relationship with Hashem),

              and on Acts of Kindness (our relationships with people)."   
                                                                         [Avot 2:1, see Derech Chayim of the Maharal]

Our tendency is to make life stand on one thing -- depending on whatever "party" or "-ism" we belong to...  With this in mind, the Alm!ghty, sent Moshe down from the mountain carrying two heavy tablets, with him in the middle (the aspect of Torah) to strike the balance between them.     

The little extremist inside of us

Life is about balance.  Every thinking adult can sense this.  I say "adult" because the average teenager will say the opposite, "life is about passion, intensity, living on the edge, etc."  They're not totally wrong, but they're clearly missing that key aspect of judgement that comes with maturity -- weighing both sides of everything.  

Humility is the gateway to receiving Torah, but as a person as a person learns more Torah, he runs the risk of becoming arrogant. 

As a person spends more time speaking to people and helping them with their problems, he will have less time to enrich himself and become a better source of advice.   

As a person amasses wealth, he will be able to give more charity, but simultaneously, he will tend to increase his own needs for luxuries.  

On the other hand, a person who does not have sufficient funds will probably be constantly anxious about where his next paycheck will come from, and possibly require receiving charity, which although will pay his bills, will lower his self-esteem, and over time, make him callous to his own sense of entitlement...

Take any one thing in life to the extreme, and you'll certainly end up with problems elsewhere.  

This is the stuff of life!  Every facet of life is interconnected with every other one.  Nothing stands in a vaccum.  There are no isolated laboratories here.     

In any given setting, there is of course a line we will intuitively draw at some point and say, "that's too far."  But can we look from a birds-eye view and determine the proper balance of all the pieces?  

How can we properly juggle all of the elements of our lives without knowing what the big picture should look like in harmony?

Imagine a waiter carrying a huge tray with 613 different-sized plates and cups on it.  If any one of them gets moved, he will have to adjust the other ones to keep the tray from toppling over.  And this metaphor is a simplification!

The world of Torah is the teaching of balance, תפארת which also means "beauty."  The 613 mitzvot correspond to the 613 moving parts of life (Ohel Yehoshua, Rav Yehoshua Heller).  Learning Torah is the business of how they interact.  At any given point in your day, there are any number of mitzvot you can do...  Which one comes first?  What if they openly contradict eachother?  ...Welcome to learning gemara!  

All of this is to educate that passionate, impetuous teenager inside of us that "just wants to go for it."  Learning Torah strengthens the aspect of Moshe inside of us, the aspect that balances those two tablets that we constantly must weigh against eachother in all of our decisions.


The teenager sees balance as something boring, bland, and beige.  Our job is to get him excited about balance -- that it is more epic than a tight wire juggling act, hundreds of feet above the ground.  It's not beige; it's a the kaleidoscopic harmony of all of life's colors.

Be Big!

We can even witness this balancing in the verses of the Torah themselves.  Last week, in parshat Kedoshim, we saw how in one breath, the Torah told us to honor our father and mother, but not to the point to which we violate the Shabbat (Vayikra 19:3).  Or, also in one breath, to reproach our fellow, but to be wary of not doing it in a way that will embarrass him (ibid 17).  If you look out for this, you will see how the Torah consistently is balancing us by showing us both sides of our obligations.

One of these places is in this weeks parsha, Emor.  

"...these are my holidays," says Hashem (ibid 23:2), and begins to list the holidays of the Jewish calendar: Shabbat, Pesach, the counting of the Omer, Shavuot... and blindsided, out of left field, we're hit with the mitzvah of Peah, leaving the corners of our fields unharvested for the poor to collect, and the mitzvah of Leket, similarly, leaving fallen bushels for the poor (ibid 22).  And then, the the Torah continues with the Jewish calendar as if nothing happened: Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur...  

...WHAT?!?  What does this have to do with the price of tea in China?  Plus, we already learned these mitzvot in last week's parsha (19:9)!

Says the Ohr haChayim haKadosh (Rav Chayim Ben-Atar) on the spot:

"Perhaps [the Torah] is coming to obligate the field from which the Omer [sacrifice is reaped] -- it too is obligated in Leket and Peah!   

A person may have thought, 'since the field was initially harvested for sacrificial purposes, it is exempt [from the mitzvot of charity...]' 

The Torah comes to teach us to the contrary!"

This is Torah pushing us to stretch in both directions!  Reaching towards Hashem, and reaching towards other people!

When we want to pray and meditate alone with G!d, the Halacha tells us to pray with a minyan (at least 10 Jewish men).

When we want to socialize in shul, the Halacha tells us to focus on our personal tefila. 

When we want to just sit and learn Torah by ourselves, the Torah tells us to learn with a chavrusa (friend)... 

A person once asked Rav Yisrael Salanter, "What kavana (mental orientation) should I have when I put on my tallit?"  


He was obviously expecting a Kabbalistic meditation involving permutations of Hashem's Name, but Rav Yisrael, the father of the modern Mussar movement, curtly answered, "Your kavana should be to make sure you don't slap anyone in the face behind you as you swing the tallis strings over your shoulder."
   

This captures it.  So often we get wrapped up in our own spirituality that we forget the people around us.  Similarly, we can get so caught up in the world of people, that we lose sight of our own relationship with Hashem.


In the Jewish consciousness, we speak about the ideal of becoming a "gadol" "a big person."  What does this mean?  It's not just a person who is a genius, or one who knows the deep secrets of reality.  That would not be a "big" person; that would be a person who is "high up," floating in the clouds.  A big person, the person we're striving to become, is a person who stretches from the heavens to the earth -- deeply rooted in closeness to the Alm!ghty, but sensitive to the needs and lacks of human beings and his environment (margala bepumya deRav Beryl Gershenfeld).


I remember the first time I saw "Gadlus" "Greatness."  I was in my junior of college when I was taken to hear Rav Shmuel Kaminetsky speak in the suburbs of Philadelphia.  Much to my embarrassment, I still don't remember what he spoke to us about at 10:30 pm in a classroom in the Yeshiva of Philadelphia.  Mind you, this was after a day of learning Torah himself, running a yeshiva of hundreds of students, and answering major Halachic questions from all over the world -- this is also a man who was around 80 years old at the time (he should live and be well).  I was asked me to ride in the car with Rav Shmuel to drive him home at close to midnight.  


The memory is etched crystal clear in my mind: the car pulled up, Rav Shmuel, one of the leaders of American Jewry, gently bid us "goodnight," he got out of the car, opened the door for me to get out of the car (!?!), said "Thank you" and "goodnight" once more.  He turned on a dime and darted/sprinted across his lawn to his front door.  He stopped.  Looked at his reflection in the glass pane in front of the door.  Brushed off his jacket.  Combed the hair under his hat, and tidied his beard.  He knocked, and walked in his home to greet his wife properly after a long day.


That's "Gadlus."  


From the life-and-death Halachic questions of the morning to the dust on his jacket, this man was serving Hashem.  


This is a vignette of the Greatness the Alm!ghty asks us of us, of what He knows we can become.
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This piece was heavily based upon the approach of one of my rebbeim, Rav Immanuel Bernstein shlita in his book Davar Mikra.  He currently has a few online venues for his shiurim:

 http://www.ishiur.com/Speakers/P1/Bernstein-Immanuel-35.html & http://web.me.com/jjbernstein/Rabbi_Immanuel_Bernstein/Welcome.html,
                        with a more centralized website in the works.