And G-d came down on Mount Sinai… and G-d called to Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up (19:20)
The Midrash Tanchuma relates the following: Once there was a king who decreed: “The people of Rome are forbidden to go down to Syria, and the people of Syria are forbidden to go up to Rome.” Likewise, when G-d created the world, He decreed and said: “The heavens are G-ds, and the earth is given to man” (Psalms 115:16). But when He wished to give the Torah to Israel, He rescinded His original decree, and declared: “The lower realms may ascend to the higher realms, and the higher realms may descend to the lower realms. And I,Myself, will begin” as it is written, “And G-d descended on Mount Sinai,” and then it says, “And to Moses He said: Go up to G-d.”
Our Sages tell us that the Patriarchs studied the Torah and fulfilled its precepts many centuries before the Torah was “officially” given at Sinai. Since no “new information” was revealed on the sixth of Sivan, what is the significance of the “giving of the Torah” on that occasion?
The answer lies in the above-quoted Midrash: at Sinai G-d abolished the decree which had consigned the physical and the spiritual to two separate domains. Thus, at Sinai was introduced a new phenomenon–the cheftza shel kedushah or “holy object.” After Sinai, when physical man takes a physical coin, earned by his physical toil and talents, and gives it to charity; or when he forms a piece of leather to a specified shape and dimensions and binds them to his head and arm as tefillin—the object with which he has performed his “mitzvah” is transformed. A finite, physical thing becomes “holy,” as its very substance and form become the actualization of a divine desire and command.
The Lubavitcher Rebber comments: “The mitzvot could be, and were, performed before the revelation at Sinai, and had the power to achieve great things within the spiritual realm (by elevating the soul of the one who performed them and effecting “unions” (yichudim) and “revelations” (giluyim) in the supernal worlds) and within the physical realm (by refining the object with which it was performed, within the limits of its natural potential). But because the mitzvot had not yet beencommanded by G-d, they lacked the power to bridge the great divide between matter and spirit. Only as a command of G-d, creator and delineator of both the spiritual and the physical, could the mitzvah supersede the natural definitions of these two realms. Only after Sinai could the mitzvah actualize the spiritual and sanctify the material.”
One of the ten commandment we read about is: “Honor your father and your mother” (20:12) And in Leviticus 19:3 it says, “Every man, his mother and father should fear.” What is the significance of the change in order? Talmud, Kiddushin 31a explains: “For it is revealed and known to G-d that a person adores his mother more than his father, and that he fears his father more than his mother. G-d therefore set the honor of one’s father first, and the fear of one’s mother first, to emphasize that one must honor and fear them both equally.”
Prepared by Devorah Abenhaim
