Who Knows Two?

Toward the end of every Passover Seder we sing a song of numbers, ascending from one to thirteen.  “Who knows one?  I know one, one is our God in the heaven and on the earth.  Who knows two?  I know two, two are the tablets of the covenant, one is our God in heaven and on the earth.  Who knows three? Etc. etc.”

“Two are the tablets of the covenant.”  We just read about them in last week’s Torah portion, twice.  Why two tablets of the covenant?  Anyone who recalls Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I, knows the answer to that.  Moses couldn’t carry three tablets without breaking one.

Rashi, the 11^th century French sage, has a different answer.  He explains that one tablet included the laws of our relationship to God while the other contains the laws of our relationship to one another.  Both tablets are of equal significance and both should be fully observed.

Others suggest that the dual nature of the tablets reminds us of the two parts of the law, the written Torah and the oral law, later codified in the Mishnah and the Talmud and the endless stream of commentaries and elucidations ever since.

The tablets were given to Moses twice.  A careful reading of the two passages describing the tablets, one prior to the sin of the Golden Calf and the other after God forgives them, reveals that they were not identical sets.  Regarding the first set we read, “The tablets were God’s work, and the writing was God’s writing, inscribed upon the tablets.”  The second time around, Moses is told, “Carve two tablets of stone like the first, and I will inscribe upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you shattered.”  The first set of tablets were entirely God’s work.  One cannot imagine a holier object, carved out by God and inscribed by the Almighty with the sacred words.  Yet they were smashed to pieces when Moses saw the people dancing around the Golden Calf.  One might say they were too holy for human beings to incorporate into their lives.  They were too heavy for us to bear.

One midrash attempts to explain how Moses at age 80 managed to shlep these two heavy stone tablets down the mountain.  According to the midrash, God helped him by holding on to the tops of the tablets.  It was only in the presence of the people’s sin that God let go and Moses had no choice but to let the tablets slip from his hands.

The second set, however, was a joint effort.  Moses carved the tablets and God did the calligraphy.  It is a perfect symbol for the Conservative concept of revelation as a joint effort by God and humankind.  It is up to us to work together with God to adapt the Divine law to the real world.  It is a struggle to live up to a divine standard, but human beings have been ready to argue and debate and discuss the law until it responded to human needs as well as the requirements of the Almighty.

British Chief Rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, brings in a mystical concept to explain why this second set of tablets was more enduring than the first.  The first he notes was an example of itaruta de’l’eylah, an awakening from above, a Divine initiative.  Such an act, he says, is “spectacular, supernatural, an event that bursts through the chains of causality that at other times bind the natural world.  An ‘awakening from below’ has no such grandeur.  It is a gesture that is human, all too human.”

Even so, he notes, the heavenly act may change nature, but it does not change human nature for no human effort has been expended.  It is overwhelming while it happens, but only while it lasts, we humans remain totally passive in its presence.  Itaruta d’letata, awakening from below, involves human participation, human initiative and thus leaves a permanent mark and is more enduring.

The sages tell us that both the second set of whole tablets and the fragments remaining from the shattered first set were ultimately placed in the holy ark within the ancient tabernacle.  Together they remind us of the miraculous appearance of God in our midst at the revelation at Sinai on one hand and, on the other, of the continuing need for us to be active participants in the revelation of Torah, thus the need for the oral Torah along with the written.  The oral Torah is the ongoing application of the teachings of God in our lives.

Who knows two?  I know two, two are the tablets of the covenant.  God is indeed One in the heaven and the earth, but to bring Torah to earth, you need two, God along with an earthly partner.  That’s were we come in, struggling to reassemble those broken tablets in a way that makes sense in our broken world.