We will do what? And hear what?

One of the most famous quotations from the Torah comes up in this week's parshah, Mishpatim. Most of the parshah focuses on the follow-up to the Ten Commandments, the nitty-gritty of what God wants the Israelites to do in everyday life. Toward the end, though, we read in Exodus 24:7:

Then he [Moses] took the record of the covenant and read it aloud to the people. And they said, "All that the Lord has spoken we will faithfully do!"

The Hebrew here is na'aseh v'nishma: literally, "we will do and we will hear." You can see that the translation I quoted chose not to give us the word-for-word meaning, and I can't blame them. Because honestly, what does that mean, "We will do and we will hear"? And why in that order?

Bring it on!

One answer might be that the Israelites have heard the commandments and they're all fired up to do them. Hearing from God face to face at Mount Sinai just blew them away. If that was the end of the conversation...it might have been the end. 

 

But hearing from Moses, in detail, how they could act from day to day in a way that pleased God--that excited them. It made them feel it was humanly possible.

On this reading, "We will do" all of the commandments given us in parshat Mishpatim. But is that all? Does God want more from us? We're ready for more: "we will hear" whatever God still wants to require from us. Bring it on!

We've been doing what good people do. We want to do what good Jews do.

Rashi, the great medieval commentator, interprets Exodus 24 in a surprisingly different way. He says it's out of chronological order and that it actually happened before the revelation at Sinai. 

In that case, what covenant did Moses read to the people? His answer: the books of Genesis and Exodus, up to that present day. And what covenant? The Noachide Laws that (according to Jewish tradition) apply to all human beings, Jewish or not. (This is the Jewish idea of Natural Law, by the way: deduced not by logic but from the text!)

So, on Rashi's reading, na'aseh means that we will keep on doing those things that were a normal part of being a decent person before. V'nishma means that we, the Jewish people, will do those things that make us distinctive, too, which are just about to be revealed to us at Sinai, in last week's parshah and in this.

First we commit, then we understand.

There's yet one more reading, and this one appeals to me. Imagine that Rashi is right, and the conversation between Moses and the people takes place before they stand at Sinai, not after. Then "We will do" is a pledge for an uncertain future. Before we hear what God wants us to do, we commit to the relationship with God. Only then are we in the right state of mind to hear and appreciate it.

What's more, "we will hear" is not a one-time event. As history goes on, we will continue to hear the word--by studying Torah in light of current circumstances and hearing what it has to command us today.

Whenever Jews gather in synagogue on a Saturday morning and chant the weekly portion from the Torah scroll, one by one, seven of us come up to say a blessing. That blessing thanks God "who gave us God's Torah and also "who gives the Torah." Right here, right now. Because a committed people cannot let the words lie on the page. Over and over, we must find new ways to understand.

 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm reading through Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg's amazing commentary on the biblical Book of Exodus, The Particulars of Rapture. Each chapter expounds one of the portions we read in the synagogue weekly. It's slow going because it is so rich with insights. To keep on track, I will post at least one insight weekly between now and mid-March, when (God willing) I finish the book.