Kavanot: שבועות תשפ״ד

That (spoiler alert!) is the key to solving the mystery: the dog didn’t bark. It is very hard to notice something that is not there.

And then we have the עשרת הדברות.

[They want to experience the numinous]

[one does not simply walk into מעמד הר סיני]

What’s missing? The most dramatic part of קבלת התורה—‎בני ישראל all say נעשה ונשמע!

For that, we have to jump ahead to the end of the next parsha, after the עשרת הדברות, and after all the follow-up laws of פרשת משפטים.

That’s a wild image: ויראו את אלקי ישראל! Sounds very deep. We know the quote from Ben Sira:

So we’re not going go kaballistic; at least not much. But we can think about metaphors.

To think about this sapphire brick under the feet of G-d, we have to look at a very similar metaphor in this morning’s haftorah, the מעשה מרכבה. You’ll hear a lot more about it tomorrow afternoon, but to quote briefly:

Same “seeing” G-d, same sapphire, but a little different—in שמות the sapphire is a brick, לבנת הספיר, rather than a stone, אבן ספיר. And in שמות they don’t see the כסא, but תחת רגליו.

The Malbim tries to understand this sapphire (note that sapphires can be any color (technically not red, because then it’s called a ruby) or transparent. It is כעצם השמים לטהר, ”pure as the sky“, and a הנגה that is כמראה הקשת אשר יהיה בענן ביום הגשם. Malbim says it is a prism:

He’s getting a little kabbalistic here. The idea is that ה׳ is infinite and unknowable but manifests in the world in perceptible ways. We can see the created world, we experience joy and tragedy and understand them all as gifts of G-d. These various ways that we experience the presence of G-d are called the ספירות, which I will leave untranslated, but we know what they are: חסד,‎ גבורה,‎ תפארת,‎ נצח,‎ הוד,‎ יסוד,‎ מלכות. These categories help us think about theological concepts; ה׳ doesn’t have “parts”—ה׳ אחד. This is “word picture, for making understanding”. The image is of ה׳'s manifestation in the world, the שפע אלוקית, is a pure Divine “light”, and we see it as a spectrum of colors. The כסא הכסוד represents the prism that refracts the white light into

The Malbim says there are two parts of this prism: כסא and תחת רגליו.

G-d manifests in the world in two ways, in the created universe, and in the social world that we create by our actions. Human beings create the ספיר by which the Divine light is refracted in the world. That’s what it means when Yeshaya says that the earth is G-d’s footstool:

That is how the Malbim sees this image of מעשה מרכבה. G-d’s presence in the world depends on our actions.

So the declaration of נעשה ונשמע, the acceptance of the ברית, the vision that symbolizes our role in creation, all of that are put in an appendix to the story of מעמד הר סיני. Why?

I think Abarbanel hints at the answer.

This part of the story isn’t thematically part of מעמד הר סיני, the special effects and fireworks. It is the story of what comes afterward. This is the introduction to ויבא משה בתוך הענן ויעל אל ההר; ויהי משה בהר ארבעים יום וארבעים לילה, to remind us that Moshe may have been special, but he is as human as the rest of us, and we all have the mission of building the metaphoric bricks that comprise the empbodiment of the ה׳'s footstool, the metaphoric בית המקדש.

As Rav Soloveitchik puts it,

This missing day isn’t in an appendix to the story of מעמד הר סיני; it’s the introduction to the sequel: our role in תיקון עולם במלכות שד־י.

חג שמח.