[Avodah] RSRH on the Giving of the Torah

[Professor L. Levine]

The following verses are from Shemos 19


10 And God said to Moshe: Go to the people and sanctify them today
and tomorrow and have them wash their garments.

11 Let them be ready for the third day, for on the third day God will descend
before the eyes of all the people upon Mount Sinai.

12 Set a boundary around the people and say to them: Be careful not to
ascend the mountain or even to touch a part of it! Whoever touches
the mountain shall be put to death.

13 Let no hand touch it! For he shall be stoned to death, or only thrown
down, whether it be beast or man, it shall not live. When the horn of
dismissal will sound a long,drawn-out blast, they may ascend the mountain again.

On these RSRH comments:

10–13 Precisely this mistaken confidence of Moshe himself, who thought that
the people had already attained the required level of spiritual and moral
maturity, greatly clarifies the meaning of, and necessity for, the preparations
and restrictions that now follow. For if we understand them
correctly, their purpose was to make the people realize, and to establish
for all time, the vast gulf that separated the spiritual and moral level
of the people at that time from the height to which they would ascend
and be educated, in the course of hundreds and thousands of years,
through the Torah, which they were now about to receive.
Closely related to the foregoing is a second purpose: to establish
historically for future generations that God, as it were, remained in His
place, opposite the people, and that His Word came to the people; God
was not inside them or in their midst, and His voice did not emerge
from within the people.
Jewish Law is the only system of laws that did not emanate from
the people whose constitution it was intended to be. Judaism is the only
“religion” that did not spring from the hearts of the people who find
in it the spiritual basis for their lives. It is precisely this “objective”
quality of Jewish Law and of the Jewish “religion” that makes them
both unique, setting them apart clearly and distinctly from all else on
earth that goes by the name of law or religion. This quality makes Jewish
Law the sole factor in human culture that can be considered the catalyst
and ultimate goal of every other manifestation of progress, whereas the
Law itself, as the given absolute ideal, remains above and beyond any
idea of progress.
All other “religions” and codes of law originate in the human minds
of a given era; they merely express the conceptions of God, of human
destiny, and of man’s relation to God and to his fellow man, that are
held by a given society in a particular period of history. Hence, all these
man-made religions and codes, like all other aspects of human civilization
— science, art, morals and manners — are subject to change
with the passing of time. For by their very nature and origin they are
nothing but the expressions of levels reached by civilization at various
stages in human development.
Not so the Jewish “religion” and Jewish Law. They do not stem from
beliefs held by human beings at one period or another. They do not
contain time-bound human concepts of God and of things human and
Divine. They are God-given; through them men are told by God’s Will
what their conceptions should be, for all time, about God and things
Divine and, above all, about man and human affairs.
>From the very outset, God’s Torah stood in opposition to the people
in whose midst it was to make its first appearance on earth. It was to
prove its power first of all upon this people, who opposed it because
they were an עַם-קְשֵׁה-עֹרֶף הוּא. . This resistance which the Torah encountered
among the people in whose midst it obtained its first home on earth is the
most convincing proof of the Torah’s Divine origin. The Torah did not
arise from within the people, but was given to the people, and only
after centuries of struggle did the Torah win the people’s hearts, so that
they became its bearers through the ages. (On the uniqueness of Judaism
and its relation to religion, see Collected Writings, vol. I, pp. 183–186;
Commentary above, 6:7.)
The purpose of all these preparations and restrictions is apparently
to emphasize and mark this contrast as clearly as possible, at the Torah’s
first entrance into the world — a contrast that so fundamentally characterizes
the Torah’s nature and origin. The Torah is about to come to
the people. Its arrival is to be anticipated over a period of three days.
In order to be worthy of even awaiting the Torah, the people must first
sanctify their bodies and their garments; that is, they must become
worthy of receiving the Torah by becoming aware, symbolically, of the
rebirth — the renewal of their lives, within and without — that the
Torah is to bring about. In their present state, they are not yet ready
to receive the Torah. Only their resolve to ultimately become what they
should be will make them worthy of receiving the Torah.
The distinction between the people about to receive the Torah, and
the Source from which they are to receive it, is underscored also in
terms of physical separation. The place from which the people are to
receive the Torah is very clearly set apart from them. It is elevated into
the realm of the extraterrestrial. No man or animal may set foot upon
that place, or even touch it. Any living thing that sets foot upon it must
be put to death. Only when the Lawgiving has been completed will the
place be restored to the terrestrial sphere, and both man and beast will
be free once more to walk upon it. Until that time, the people are to
be restricted by a boundary all around, beyond which they must not
go. All this is done in order to illustrate the fact of the Torah’s superhuman,
extraterrestrial origin.






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