Exodus 34:1 states: "Carve out two stone tablets like the first
ones, and I will write on them the words that were on the first tablets, which
you broke." Rabbi Jonathan Sacks finds great meaning here:
Hence the paradox: the first tablets, made by
God, did not remain intact. The second tablets, the joint work of God and
Moses, did. Surely the opposite should have been true: the greater the
holiness, the more eternal. Why was the more holy object broken while the less
holy stayed whole? This is not, as it might seem, a question specific to the
tablets. It is, in fact, a powerful example of a fundamental principle in
Jewish spirituality. The Jewish mystics distinguished between two types of
divine-human encounter. They called them itaruta de’l’eylah and itaruta
de’letata, respectively “an awakening from above” and “an awakening from
below.” The first is initiated by God, the second by mankind. An “awakening
from above” 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.
Yet there is another difference between them,
in the opposite direction. An “awakening from above” may change nature, but it
does not, in and of itself, change human nature. In it, no human effort has
been expended. Those to whom it happens are passive. While it lasts, it is
overwhelming; but only while it lasts. Thereafter, people revert to what they
were. An “awakening from below,” by contrast, leaves a permanent mark. Because human beings have taken the initiative, something in them changes.
Their horizons of possibility have been expanded. They now know they are
capable of great things, and because they did so once, they are aware that they
can do so again. An awakening from above temporarily transforms the external
world; an awakening from below permanently transforms our internal world. The
first changes the universe; the second changes us.
Jonathan Sacks, Covenant
and Conversation Exodus: The Book of Redemption, 271-272 (footnotes omitted)
(Maggid Books 2010).
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