This Saturday night is Shavuot, zman matan Torateinu; the holiday on which we commemorate the giving of the Torah. Traditions on this holiday include decorating one's home with flowers, eating dairy dishes, and staying up all night to learn Torah and related subjects.
Usually when it comes to divrei torah, I prefer to engage in a close reading of a particular piece of text from the book itself. But for this particular holiday, if you'll bear with me, I'd like to go with something more in the spirit of a 3 AM philosophical discussion -- so let's step into the cloudier territory of midrash*. Because let's be real here, the account of God giving the Torah to the Israelites is pretty cloudy to begin with. And I mean literally cloudy:
15 And Moshe [Moses] went up into the mount, and the cloud covered the mount.
16 And the glory of the LORD abode upon Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days; and the seventh day He called unto Moshe out of the midst of the cloud.
17 And the appearance of the glory of the LORD was like devouring fire on the top of the mount in the eyes of the children of Israel.
18 And Moshe entered into the midst of the cloud, and went up into the mount; and Moshe was in the mount forty days and forty nights.
-Exodus 24
Whatever happened on that mountain, the text implies, nobody saw it except for Moshe and God. We get a great deal of their conversation -- mostly God giving Moshe instructions and laws to pass on to the people -- but probably not forty days and forty nights' worth. So what else happened up there?
This is one of the commonest types of midrash aggadah, of course -- the interstitial stories. Some of which are more startling than others.
Follow me through the fiery cloud for a story about something we see very little of in the Torah itself, but quite a lot of in midrash: angels.
*For those of you not familiar with the concept of midrash, it's important to keep in mind that even the strictest adherents to the idea that the Tanakh is historical truth do not hold that midrash is necessarily so. This is a story; whatever truth we find in it need not have anything to do with whether or not the events in it ever happened.
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Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
And even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
Which we are just able to endure,
And we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
- Rainer Maria Rilke |
A funny thing about angels in midrash is they often don't seem to
like human beings very much. There's one story about the creation of the world, wherein a faction of angels argues with God that humans shouldn't be created at all, saying that they will be disobedient and untruthful and quarrelsome. (And, well ... they're not exactly
wrong about that.) The opposing faction of angels doesn't try to deny this, but argues that humans will
also be kind and seek justice, and therefore should be created anyway. God takes the side of the angels who favor humanity's creation, and here we are.
Fast-forward a bunch of generations to Sinai, and here comes Moshe to receive the Torah. And once again, some angels object.
Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said: When Moshe ascended on high, the angels said before God: "Master of the Universe! What is one born of woman doing among us?"
He said to them: "He has come to receive the Torah."
They said before Him: "The cherished treasure, that was kept by You for nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created -- You desire to give it to flesh and blood? What is man that You should remember him, or the son of man that You should recall him? (Psalms 8:5)"
Wait, what? Nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created? What does that even mean??
We're gonna put that aside for a moment and press on -- pausing only to note that the line quoted from Psalms is also referenced in the midrash I mentioned earlier, where the angels argue that humans shouldn't be created at all: what is man that You should remember him? -- and come back to this later.
God said to Moshe: "Return them an answer."
[Moshe] said before Him: "Master of the Universe, I am in fear lest they burn me with the breath in their mouths."
[God] said to him: "Grasp hold of the Throne of my Glory, and return them an answer."
[Moshe] said before Him: "Master of the Universe, the Torah that you are giving me – what is written in it?"
"I am the LORD your God, Who has taken you out of the land of Egypt."
He said to [the angels]: "Did you descend to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? ... What else is written in it?"
"There shall not be unto you the gods of others."
"Do you live among nations who worship idols? What else is written in it?"
"Remember the Sabbath Day to make it holy."
"Do you do any labor from which you would need to rest? What else is written in it?"
"You shall not take..." [The text isn't even finishing the sentences now; this is "You shall not take the name of God in vain."]
"Are there business transactions among you? What else is written in it?"
"Honor your father and your mother."
"Do you have a father and mother? What else is written in it?"
"You shall not murder; you shall not commit adultery; you shall not steal."
"Is there envy among you? Is there evil inclination among you?"
Immediately they [the angels] conceded to God, as it is said: Lord God, how mighty is Your name etc. [see the end of Psalms 8]. ... And immediately each one [of the angels] became a friend to Moshe, and gave him a thing [alternately, told him a word].
Wow. There's a lot of deeply weird stuff going on in this story, but two points strike me immediately:
1) "Angels arguing with God" is a trope that shows up every so often in midrash, and it always strikes me as weird, because in Jewish tradition angels don't have free will. Are we supposed to take this as some allegorical depiction of God's own ambivalence, like parts of the body arguing with each other a la The Awkward Yeti? As a test for Moshe, where the angels are objecting pro forma as per God's offscreen orders? As an indication that angels may have individual opinions even if they don't have free will with regard to action? I'm honestly not sure.
2) But even weirder: are we meant to understand that the angels don't already know what's in the Torah, when as they say it's existed for so long in Heaven? And if they do know, how could they not be aware that everything in it is about the mortal physical world -- beginning with its creation and tracking the lives, not just of nations, but of particular individual humans? What is man that You should remember him? -- He's the subject matter of this very Torah the angels dispute his right to receive!
To understand this I think we need to go back and take another look at what the angels say about the Torah and its history.
The "nine hundred and seventy-four generations" is a weirdly specific number; the source of it, apparently, is a verse in Psalms (105:8) that describes the Torah as being held by God for "a thousand generations," in a context that suggests that the thousand generations in question were before the giving of the Torah to the Israelites. And since there are twenty-six generations between Adam and Moshe, the remaining 974 generations must have been before Adam.
... I don't know how seriously to take that math, or how much it helps if one does. The important takeaway, it seems to me, is that the Torah existed in some fashion prior to the physical universe. Which neatly parallels a different midrash, in which God used the Torah as a manual of sorts when He created the universe.
Except that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, when you look at the book and at the world and see how much of the world is described only vaguely, or left out completely. Whatever else one can say about the Torah we have, it definitely doesn't hold up as a builder's manual for the universe. I mean, we are talking about the same Torah here, aren't we?
Well ... maybe not, exactly.
It's said that the original Torah that God gave to Moshe on Sinai had no spaces between the letters. An unbroken string of letters, only comprehensible by putting in empty spaces. There's also a tradition that if the letters are spaced differently, what you get is not a narrative but something else entirely: all the different names of God, each with its own subtle shades of meaning and power.
The Torah the angels knew wasn't the story of the world, or of any part of it. It was a list poem, a song of praise to God, telling over His attributes and His glory simply by enumerating His many names. And they perceived -- correctly, I think -- that it would make no sense at all to give that Torah to human beings, none of whom could possibly comprehend it.
What they didn't perceive, what they couldn't perceive, was that their understanding of the Torah was not the only one possible.
We can't really understand what it's like to be an angel. We can't understand the angelic point of view. And fairly often the implication of that seems to be: we can't understand the angelic point of view because we're inferior to them, because of our physicality. There's this pervasive idea that the physical is inherently inferior to the nonphysical, that our bodies and our brains and the material world itself are all holding us down, keeping us from achieving the ideal state of pure spirituality. That the physical is by its very nature a stumbling block to the spiritual, a barrier to connecting with God. The angels certainly seem to believe that: basar v'dam they call Moshe, flesh and blood, and lilud ishah –- it's translated as "one born of woman" but I don't feel that really captures the phrasing. Lilud is the noun form of the verb that means to give birth. "Birthing." "Thing that was born." Conjugations in Hebrew often don't quite translate into English; I think the closest English equivalent might be "spawn." It emphasizes the physical baseness of human birth, and it reads to me like a deliberate devaluing of Moshe on that account.
I believe this midrash comes to tell us, in part, that this idea is fundamentally false. That our nature as material beings doesn’t have to be a barrier to God; that rather it is meant to be a conduit to God. That one can achieve spiritual heights through being material that are not accessible any other way. And it’s not about overcoming the physical in order to reach the spiritual; it’s about using the physical.
I think if you look at the midrash that way, it explains a great deal about it. It's why Moshe can't answer the angels initially; it's why he's able to eventually; and it's why God wanted Moshe to be the one to give the answer in the first place.
Which, why does He? Why doesn't God just explain to the angels "Look, the Torah I’m giving them is designed for them, they'll get it, it's all good"? I'm thinking maybe for the challenge to be answered properly, it has to be answered by Moshe, as a representative for humanity: you don't merit the Torah unless you can defend your right to have it.
But look at what Moshe says: I am in fear lest they burn me with the breath in their mouths. And that word, the one translated as breath, is hevel. More often translated as emptiness or nothingness. It's not the word ruach or neshamah or any of the words used for human breath -- because the other meaning of ruach and neshamah and all the other words for breath is soul. Those are words that mean life in a physical being. But angels aren't physical, and don't breathe. Where humans have breath, they have nothing -- and that nothingness can consume, somehow. Like Rilke says, centuries later: every angel is terrifying.
And I think what Moshe is expressing here is not the fear that comes with the threat of physical harm, but the fear that comes with a sense of inferiority and unworthiness: look at what they are, he says, and look at what I am. How can I speak to them?
Because what God says back to him is: well, look at what you are. You're a human. A living soul in a living body. So be one. Grasp hold of My Throne -- touch and grasp, possibly the most basic physical action there is -- and answer them.
So Moshe does. One man, alone in the Heavenly court, raises his voice and ... in the classic tradition of our people, answers a question with a question. And it's a question we've heard before, in other midrashic stories about the giving of the Torah. This Torah you want to give me: what's written in it? What does it say?
And God answers him. Again and again, back and forth, God answers, going through the entire Ten Commandments. And each time, Moshe asks the angels how these answers can apply to them, which patently they don't: angels don't have envy or lust, angels don't have mothers and fathers to honor, and so on. And apparently this is all news to the angels. Because until a human being asked that question, until the Torah was offered for human perception, this particular set of answers didn't exist.
And this is why once Moshe has gone through his question-and-answer with God, and once the angels have to concede that yes, the Torah should be given to humans ... this is why after all that, the angels are thrilled and delighted to have been overruled. To the point where they all become friends to Moshe, and give him things; teach him things, the wording implies.
Because when a huge part of your existence is spent in constant study of this vast, complex work, when you think you know it backwards and forwards, it's the greatest joy imaginable to suddenly be shown a whole new set of meanings in it, a whole new interpretation that you could never possibly have seen on your own. Think about it: the angels have studied the Torah since before Creation, and this way of looking at it is completely new to them. No wonder they're thrilled; no wonder they feel such love and gratitude to Moshe. He's taught them something, he's given them something, that could only have come from what he is: a mortal human being, a living soul in a physical body, who has brought every part of himself willingly and wholeheartedly into the service of his creator. A being that stands on the earth and puts out its hand to touch the Throne of God.
I want to close with one final piece of the story, and it's this: what was it that the angels gave Moshe, in their sudden gratitude?
Rashi gives one example in discussion on the midrash: the angel of death, he says, is the one who gave Moshe the secret of how to use the bronze serpent to cure the plague that happened a few chapters later. And so far as I know, that's the only thing we're told about that. But if you'll bear with me just a bit further, I want to speculate about what one more of these gifts might have been.
As most of you probably know, it is traditionally held that the Torah -- here specifically meaning the Pentateuch, or the Five Books of Moses -- were first written by Moshe, dictated to him by God. In this tradition, there's long been the question of who wrote the last verses of the Torah, the ones that deal with Moshe's death and what came after. One midrash holds that Moshe himself did in fact write them; the obvious paradox of how Moshe could have chronicled his own death is addressed by saying that he wrote b'dim'ah, with tears. Which is to say that he was unable to read, or in some deeper way unable to comprehend, what he was writing.
One interpretation of that midrash says b'dim'ah means not with tears but rather (drawn from a different root word) in confusion, or more literally in a mixture. And possibly this harks back to the idea of the original Torah, the Torah that existed before Creation, with all the words blended together into a single long utterance. In that way, Moshe could write something that hadn't happened yet – in the same way that the Torah could exist before anything it described had happened. As a series of letters that formed not a narrative of the mortal world, but a part of the long list of the names of God.
And I'm inclined to suggest that here, at the very end of Moshe's life, for the last task he had to accomplish but couldn't accomplish with human abilities and perceptions -- possibly this was direct Divine intercession, but possibly it was the last of the gifts given him by the angels. Moshe gave the angels a way to perceive the human Torah, the material Torah, and at the end of his life they gave him a way to perceive the angelic Torah. In gratitude, and blessing, and love.
Chag sameach to everybody celebrating Shavuot, and a good weekend to all.