Last week’s dëvar Torah contained the assertion that the ‘Asereth ha-Dibbëroth, constitue an “executive summary” of the 613 mitzvoth; hence the common translation of the term dibbëroth as though it means “commandment” (i.e., mitzva) is incorrect, misleading, and most of all, inadequate.
The source of that statement is in this week’s parasha: ויאמר ד' אל משה עלה אלי ההרה והי' שם ואתנה לך את לחת האבן והתורה והמצוה אשר כתבתי להורותם (“And Ha-Shem said to Moshe, 'Come up onto the mountain to Me and I shall give you the stone tablets and the Torah and the mitzva which I have written to instruct them”; XXIV, 12).
Ramban notes that this is mentioned again in Deuteronomy V, 28: ואדברה אליך את כל המצוה והחקים והמשפטים אשר תלמדם וגו' (“And I shall speak [Va-adabbëra] to you all of the mitzva and the laws and the judgments which you will teach them”), and continues: ורש"י כתב אשר כתבתי בתוך לוחות האבנים להורותם שכל שש מאות ושלוש עשרה מצות בתוך עשרת הדברות הם כו' "ואדברה" יעיד כי על כל המצות כולן דבר ועל דעת רבותינו יתכן כי יהי' רמז שהיתה כל התורה כתובה לפניו קודם שנברא העולם וגו' (“And Rashi has written, ‘Which I have written within the stone Tablets to instruct them that all 613 mitzvoth are in the ‘Asereth ha-Dibbëroth.... Va-adabbëra attests that He spoke of all the mitzvoth in their entirety, and in the opinion of Hazal it is established that there is an allusion that the entire Torah lay written before Him before the world was created....”).
The Talmud seems to go farther than this: א"ר שמעון בן לקיש כו' "לוחות" – אלו עשרת הדברות, "תורה" – זה מקרא, "והמצוה" – זו משנה, "אשר כתבתי" – אלו נביאים וכתובים, "להורותם" – זה גמרא, מלמד שכולם נתנו למשה מסיני (“Said Rabbi Shim‘on ben Laqish...‘Tablets’ – these are the ‘Asereth ha-Dibbëroth; ‘Torah’ – this is the written Torah; ‘and the mitzva’ – this is Mishna; ‘which I have written’ – these are the [books of the] Prophets and Writings; ‘to instruct them’ – this is gëmara, teaching that all of them were given to Moshe from Sinai”; ברכות ה.).
So it seems apparent that a dibbëra, which I have inadequately translated “utterance,” is something other than a mitzva. Since each of the former “contains” or “includes” dozens of the latter. What exactly is a dibbëra?
B.
It seems clear from what Ramban writes in the quotation supra that it is related to the most common word meaning “speak” in the Holy Language, one which occurs many hundreds of not thousands of times in Tanach. Yet, it does not mean “speech” (that is dibbur), nor does it mean word (davar, also from the same root). It is the latter which allows us to approach the word’s meaning.
On several occasions in the past, I have taken note of the fact that davar signifies simultaneously “word” and “thing”, and on this basis suggested that a davar is not merely a vocal utterance (for which we have the word milla), or a row of characters on a page (for which there is the word téva), but a “word” in its fullest physical and metaphysical sense, the archetype which contains the DNA, as it were, of the object, phenomenon, or concept which it names (most recently, this principle found allusion in A”z Yashir, Bë-Shallah, 5771).
In this context, we note that this most common word for “speech,” dibbér, is in the pi‘él conjugation, which is factitive in nature, that is, it denotes bringing something into existence, making it manifest in the world around us. It is also plain from the fortis middle radical of dibbëra (transliterated “bb”), that it is directly related to this conjugation, whose signature consonantal manifestation is precisely that fortis middle radical.
A few years ago, my good friend Rabbi Dr A. Corré pointed out to me that one of the functions of the suffix -a in the Holy Language (which usually signifies a word of feminine gender) is to distinguish a single exemplar of a general case, which is described by a form generally considered masculine. A couple of examples will illustrate the point: In I Kings VII, 22 and 26, the word shoshan (masculine in appearance) is used to describe a lily-motif which was used to grace the capitals of the columns in the Holy Temple; the word shoshanna (feminine in form), denotes a single lily. Similarly, the word dema‘ denotes weeping, tears in the collective (an expression such as “she burst into tears” might be translated with dema‘), whilst a dim‘a is a single tear.
This, I believe, is the essential relationship between dibbur and dibbëra – the former connotes “speech” in its fullest metaphysical, generative sense, and the latter connotes a unit of factitive speech; a dibbëra is a specific unit of dibbur.
Ramban’s remark supra that the entire Torah lay written, kav’yachol, before G-d at Creation is a reference to the dictum קודשא בריך הוא אסתכל באורייתא וברא עלמא, “The Holy One, Blessed is He, looked into the Torah and created the world” (זוה"ק ח"ב קס"א: וע"ע בראשית רבה פ"א סי' ב'). The Torah is the very warp and woof of the universe; connected at every point, it contains all of the “natural laws” which define and govern the cosmos (as Hazal say, "הליכות עולם לו" – אל תקרא "הליכות" אלא "הלכות" [“’The ways (halichoth) of the world are His’ (Habakkuk III, 6) – read not halichoth but rather halachoth”; מגילה כ"ח:]). As G-d Himself proclaims through the prophet Yirmëyahu: אם לא בריתי יומם ולילה חקות שמים וארץ לא שמתי (“If My covenant is not by day and by night, the laws of heaven and earth I have not established”; Jeremiah XXXIII, 25; ע"ע עבודה זרה ג.).
What remained, then, was to get the user’s manual, the control panel, as it were, into the hands of the human race, the dëmuth Eloqim, whose purpose was, and is, to administer the cosmos through, and by means of, and in keeping with the principles of, the Torah. Inded, התנה הקב"ה עם מעשה בראשית וא"ל אם ישראל מקבלים התורה אתם מתקיימין ואם לאו אני מחזיר אתכם לתהו ובהו (“The Holy One, Blessed is He, made a condition with Creation, and said to it, If Israel accept the Torah, you continue in existence; and if not, I return you to chaos!”; שבת פ"ח. וע"ע זוה"ק ח"ג קצ"ג. ורח"ץ:).
This was the function of the ‘Asereth ha-Dibbëroth – to make the mitzvoth manifest, and available for use, in this world. But if Moshe was indeed given everything from Sinai, to include the sifrei Nach which comprise the rest of the Bible with the Torah, and the Mishna and Gëmara, the components of the Oral Torah, why was it not imparted to us en bloc at Sinai? Why were we obliged to wait centuries and millennia for the continued revelations of these works?
C.
The Sforno provides a fascinating insight: כי לולא חטאו בעגל היתה כל התורה נתונה חתומה ביד הבורא יתברך כמו הלוחות כמו שהעיר באמרו "ואתה מרבבות קדש מימינו אש דת למו" ומאז שחטאו בעגל לא זכו בכך אבל כתבה משה במצותו כאמרו "כתב לך את הדברים האלה" ולא הביא משה רבנו את הלוחות אלא לשברם לעיניהם לשבר את לבם הזונה כדי שיחזרו בתשובה (“For had they not sinned with the [golden] calf, the entire Torah would have been given, sealed by the hand of the blessed Creator, like the Tablets, as He noted when He said, ‘And He came from the myriads of holiness, from His right hand was the fire of religion to them’ [Deuteronomy XXXIII, 2]; and since they did sin with the calf, they did not merit this, but rather Moshe wrote it at His command, as He says, ‘Write for yourself these words’ [Exodus XXXIV, 27]; and Moshe only brought the Tablets to shatter them before [Israel’s] eyes, to break their straying heart in order that they might return in tëshuva”).
When the ‘erev rav panicked and stampeded some of the weaker souls in Israel into viewing Aharon’s construction in an idolatrous light, as if it were an intermediary between the Creator and His creation (cf., ibid., XXXII, 4, Rashi et Ramban ad loc.), it created a distance between G-d and Israel which, even after the subsequent reconciliation, was not completely closed. The result was that the Torah, from the initial infusion of the dibbëroth, came to be unfolded in a process entangled with human agency and temporal causality, a process of revelation from nistar to nigla (to use the terminology of the Përi Tzaddiq), of continual expansion through the mitzva of talmud Torah and the hiddush Torah inherent in it, to this day.
D.
Yet it is the very same Torah, and it has indeed been given into our hands: לא בשמים היא, “It is not in the heavens,” rather קרוב אליך הדבר מאד בפיך ובלבבך לעשותו, “the matter is very close to you in your mouth and in your heart to do” (Deuteronomy XXX, 12, 14).
So long as faithful Israel remain true to the task, the chaos is held at bay.
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