In this week’s reading, we learn that Moshe received the entire Torah during 40 days on top of Mount Sinai, and received two Tablets that were miracles unto themselves (the Medrash tells us that letters engraved all the way through, similar to O, Q, B, etc. in English, retained their centers, and one could read the Tablets from either side). Yet when he came down and learned that the Children of Israel had made an idol, he smashed the Tablets!
Rashi says [to 32:19] that Moshe said to himself, “The entirety of Torah is here, and all of Israel has strayed, and I should give it to them?”
To this we could ask: why not? What was wrong with giving the Torah to them, to correct their errors and bring them back to the path of Hashem? Would it not have been better for Moshe to do so?
The Pardes Yosef writes that when Moshe heard that “your nation has strayed,” [32:7], he thought to himself that the children of Israel had strayed from the path of the Torah by adopting the idolatry of other nations. So he initially believed, as we asked, that he could give them the Tablets, teach them the Torah, and quickly turn them around to correct the error that they had made.
But when he came down he saw that they had made an “internal idolatry” for themselves, a Jewish one, “in the camp” [32:17], based upon Jewish beliefs. They were using an altar (“and he built an altar before it” [32:5]), and saying the same prayers (“these are your L-rd, Israel” [32:4]), but behind the Jewish signs they were hiding something as terrible as idolatry itself.
This is what caused Moshe to lose hope. He had the entire Torah with him, encapsulated in the Tablets, and he saw that they would use it only to disguise their self-destruction. At that point, there was no alternative but to break them.
This is a lesson that resonates today. The idea that someone could use Torah trappings to make something foreign out to be Jewish is hardly unfamiliar.
True story: there was a group of Jews who held an anti-Israel rally, at which they read from the Torah to show how Jewish they were. But the passage they read (from the portion of the week, I believe) was one of many that includes G-d’s promise of the Land of Israel to the People of Israel. And the reader rushed through in a low voice, as if she were reading the curses! [The passages describing punishment of Israel for straying, in the readings of Bechukosai (at the end of Leviticus) and Ki Savo (near the end of Deuteronomy) are read in this way.]
The Torah teaches us that following the Torah does not mean doing as we wish and calling it Judaism, but subordinating our own will to Hashem and his teaching. We should always rejoice in the opportunity to follow intelligence greater than our own!
