THE COVENANT OF SINAI AND THE COVENANT IN THE CLEFT OF THE ROCK

Yehonatan Chipman
To Professor Jacob Milgrom, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday

In his introduction to the volume on the Book of Numbers in the New JPS Torah Commentary, Jacob Milgrom (citing the work of Newing) refers to the structure of the Hextateuch-the Five Books of the Torah plus the Book of Joshua-as a "grand introversion." That is, an expanded version of the "chiasm," or ABB'A' pattern, in which two elements are crossed in inverse order. Here, there are a series of paired incidents or subjects, throughout the length of these six books, arranged symmetrically around a central point, like an ascending pyramid. This structure creates a sense of balance, suggesting a certain schema moving, first "from slavery," and then "to freedom," and focusing attention on the central point in the schema. What is striking for our purposes is that, viewed through this prisim, the center or focus of the entire Torah (plus Joshua) is the theophany to Moses in the cleft of the rock in Parshat Ki Tisa. What is it about this scene that could convey it such crucial importance?

On one level, the dialogue between Moses and God recorded in Exodus 33 may be read as a discussion of the limits of human religious knowledge. The story of the Golden Calf is familiar; after intervening with God to fully furguve the people, Moses makes two requests. First, "make known to me Your ways" (33:13)- that is, show Your involvement with the people in your covenantal name of HVYH by accompanying them "personally." Second, Moses desires a personal epiphany of God's essence: "show me your glory" (33:18). Not merely "knowledge," but "seeing"; not only "your ways," but also "your glory." God accedes to this request only in part. Regarding the former, He states: "I will let all my goodness pass before you, and will call upon the name of the Lord before you, and I shall be gracious to whom I am gracious, and merciful to whom I am merciful," but then immediately adds, lest Moses think that there is to be a full epiphany of the Divine glory, that "you may not see my face, for no man may see me and live" (vv. 19-20). But then, in a kind of compromise, He adds: "When my glory passes by, I shall place you in the cleft of the rock, and you shall see my back, but my face you shall not see." Moses is not granted the mystic vision of the secret of God's "face" or the "glory" of God as He is "in Himself." He is only allowed a glimpse, of a strictly limited type. The Talmud states, rather arcanely, that Moses was only allowed to see "the knot of God's tefillin."

What Moses is given is a kind of moralistic epiphany: knowledge concerning the nature of God's behavior, and especially His quality of forgiveness, writ large in the "thirteen qualities of mercy" that are presented in the next chapter (34:6-7). It would seem that one is meant to draw from this a spiritually austere, "Lithuanian," anti-mystical message: the proper concern of the religious human being is not knowledge of God Himself, but of His ways-His ethical qualities, His capacity for forgiveness and mercy and compassion. The first rule of religious ethics is imitatio dio, "imitation of God." Our interest in the nature of God is not aimed at mystical, esoteric knowledge, but at ethics: we desire knowledge of God so as to imitate his ethical way in our own lives, here on this earth. A noble, humanistic sort of message. But there is something more here. The mystical vision is limited, not only because man's proper place is with the ethical, but because God is ineffable, transcendent, frightening; because this is all that man can perceive-in any event, without dying or going insane (compare "the four who entered Pardes" in Hagiggah Ch. 2).

The Golden Calf: Sin and Forgiveness
The epiphany at the Cleft of the Rock needs to be understood within the context of Het ha-Egel, the sin of the Golden Calf. This event has a powerful resonance in Jewish thought, be it in Midrash, in traditional exegesis, or in the Musar and Derush (ethical-homiletical) literature. One might even say that it occupies a place in Jewish mythology roughly corresponding to that of Original Sin in Christian doctrine. The difference is, of course, that the sin of the Calf is not an individual one, but The Sin, with capital letters, of the Jewish people as a whole, betraying the Sinai covenant only weeks after it is made. The figure that constantly recurs in this context is that of the unfaithful wife: the smashing of the tablets is, in one widespread reading, the tearing up of the marriage document -either in anger, or in a quick-witted move by Moses to diminish the people's culpability.

Interestingly, in much of the discussion of the sin of the Golden Calf among midrashic authors and medieval exegetes, there is a strong tendency to say that the sin was not "real" idolatry, but something else of lesser severity: perhaps a misunderstanding or misapprehension on the part of the people, either of the situation or of what the Torah required of them. Perhaps we can understand it in the following way: When God gave the Torah to the people through Moses, He expected them to keep it with loyalty and devotion and love and enthusiasm, as dedicated servants, former slaves who knew they owed everything to their Divine liberator. Perhaps He even expected commitment to the highest, most sublime level of religious awareness and consciousness.

But what God didn't bargain for is that the people were... well, people. Their "true" concerns were the ordinary, mundane stuff of life: getting up in the morning and knowing that they have something to eat, both for themselves and for their women and children; shelter, to protect them from the freezing cold of the desert night and from the blazing heat of the midday sun; security, from wild beasts and snakes and other people; to occasionally lie with a woman and otherwise have a good time-perhaps to get up and dance and sing, or to sit around the campfire telling stories... So it was with them, and so it is, for all our vaunted modernity and technology and "21st century," with us today.

Into all this came Moses with his God and His revelation. The people saw the thunder and lightning and experienced something overwhelming-but exactly what that something was they might be hard put to explain, exactly. They were, in fact, so overwhelmed that each time they heard God's voice they "jumped backwards" twelve mil-twelve kilometers. And after the first two commandments they said, "you speak with Him, for otherwise we will die-and afterwards you can tell us what he said" (based on 20:16). The true, full revelation was essentially to Moses, who quickly assumed the role of intercessor (thus Maimonides in Guide for the Perplexed, II.33, albeit expressed rather more elegantly). To the people, the identity of God and of Moses were all muddled together in a vague sense of awe and reverence and holiness-of the presence of the numinous-which translated itself into what was considered sacred.

Is it not always thus with holy men, with prophets, with those blessed with mantic powers? Pay a visit to the grave of the Baba Sali in Netivot, or to Meron on Lag ba-Omer, or think about the ubiquitous photographs of the late Lubavitcher Rebbe or other tzaddikim-and reflect how easily pious, Orthodox Jews cross the boundary from reverence, to outright adulation and near-worship of a mortal human being. Popular religious sentiment can be fickle, but deeply emotional. Moses was the beloved leader, who had given them the courage to break away from the bonds of Egypt in the first place; to defy their slave-masters by tying up the lambs next to their doors for four days, then instructing them to slaughter them and sprinkle the blood on the doors and not to be afraid; to pack all their belongings, with the kneaded matza cakes on their shoulders, and to simply walk away from Egypt. And he too was the central figure on that great and awesome day in the desert when they heard God's voice, and it was he who sat there to interpret it for them. So when, as the Torah tells us, "Moses tarried to return": he didn't come back when they expected him-perhaps, one midrash says, by only a few hours, and no doubt due to a faulty calculation on their part-they started to worry. "For this man Moses, we don't know what is become of him" (32:1, 23). This being the case, they needed someone or something else-not so much to teach them or to guide them, as to symbolize the presence of what they had come to think of as the Divine. It is clear from the text that the mood in the camp was one of total confusion. Note Aaron's words: "I took the gold and threw it into the fire, and out came this calf" (32:24). No one seems to have shaped it; it wasn't the result of any premeditated plan; it just happened. To change our terms of reference, we can imagine something like that happening at an orgiastic party where everybody was stoned-on drugs, on drink, on the rhythm of the music, from the motion and dancing and the sense of breaking away from everyday routine. "These are neither shouts of victory, nor cries of defeat, but sounds of 'answering' [or: singing]" (v. 18)-that is, a hubbub of totally undisciplined voices.

Into this fray, Moses brings a simple message to God. "Give them another chance; forgive them. That's just how people are-fickle, easily disappointed, easily prone to following their basest emotions in a crisis, especially if there is no strong leader around." It is interesting that the conventional image of Moses in Western [i.e., Christian] art is of an angry, stern, unbending leader, who hurls the tablets to the ground in a fit of fury and rage. By contrast, the Midrash paints Moses as a tender, loving, fatherly figure, who stops at nothing to convince God to repent; indeed, it devotes two lengthy chapters (Exodus Rabbah 43-44) to the arguments put forward by Moses in this attempt at persuasion.

This returns us to our original question. What kind of lesson of compassion does God give Moses when he "reveals" the thirteen attributes of mercy? Moses already knew full well the supreme value of compassion, of mercy, forgiveness, etc. Perhaps, indeed, the chapter needs to be read differently. God is simply proclaiming to Moses "for the record"-for future generations, and for the present-the fact that He relents of His fierce anger, and that Moses was right all along.

The Revelation of Shavuot and the Revelation of Yom Kippur
Let us return to the very beginning: to the story of the Flood and the verses that frame it in Genesis 6:5 and 8:21. Originally, God saw mankind as utterly perverse, degenerate and generally no good: "all the impulses of the thoughts of his heart are only evil all the day." After the Flood, and Noah's offer of sacrifices, God somehow relented. Something tender inside Him, as-it-were, was moved: He saw people as frail, weak, almost child-like: "for the impulse of man's heart is evil from his youth." Therefore, he concludes, it is not fitting to wipe him out; rather, He must find another way for dealing with the weakness and flaws in humankind's character. In our chapter, too, God starts out filled with anger. Having made a covenant with his chosen people, with the descendants of his beloved followers, the three patriarchs, each one of whom was a truly remarkable moral and spiritual figure, it seemed only right that their great-great-grandchildren be held to the same high standard. Yet things didn't work out that way. Somehow, through the dialogue with Moses, God came to see things differently. As Buber once said, all knowledge is dialogic: that a person can only learn, can only break out of his own ingrained patterns of thinking and reacting, through a situation of dialogue, of speaking to and interacting with the other. The radical message here is that even God, so to speak, only learns dialogically. Through dealing with the sin of the Golden Calf, and with the dialogue with Moses that ensued, He realized that He needed to change the rules of his interactions with the Jewish people (and presumably, by extension, with mankind generally). There is, of course, a major, profound problem here for those who believe in a Maimonidean, Aristotelian God, unchanged and unchangeable, the embodiment of eternal perfection, etc. But the biblical and/or midrashic God is quite different, clearly possessing a personality and the ability to change and, if one can dare to say such a thing, to grow. But all that is another discussion.

In conclusion: the Torah relates two revelations, two kinds of theophany: that of Shavuot, and that of Yom Kippur. (There is a well-known Rabbinic tradition that the scene in the cleft of the rock took place on Yom Kippur: the first 40 days from Shavuot ended with the smashing of the tablets on the 17th of Tammuz; the next 40 days, of Moses' beseeching forgiveness, ended on Rosh Hodesh Ellul; a third group of 40 days, during which he received the Torah a second time, ends on Yom Kippur). The revelation of Shavuot is one of sternness, of apodictic, unconditional commands, given with the name Elohim, leaving no room for human failure. By contarst, the revelation of Yom Kippur is one of love, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, rooted in the sacred name HVYH: that there is room in the world for both man and God to change and repent of their former ways. The location of Exodus 33 in Milgrom's "grand introversion" suggests that the latter revelation is the greater one.

Rabbi Jonathan Chipman is a translator by profession, and a scholar in Jewish studies. He writes a weekly sheet (in English) on the portion of the week and the Haftara, titled "Hitsei Yehonatan".
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