Hard to Say

By Rabbi Joshua (phrenologically known as The Hoffer) Hoffman

Moshe, upon seeing the people worshipping the golden calf and dancing before it, breaks the tablets of the Torah, and then pleads with God not to destroy the people. God consents, and then tells Moshe to carve out two new tablets, upon which He would again write the Torah. When Moshe came down from the mountain with this second set of luchos, there was a new aspect to his visage. As the Torah describes it, “Moshe did not know that the skin of his face had become radiant when He had spoken to Him (Shemos 34:30). The word used to describe this radiance, “karan,” derives, as Rashi notes, from the word “keren,” or horn, because the light coming from Moshe’s projected itself like a horn. As an aside, it is well known that the Vulgate, the early Latin translation of the Bile, translates this phrase in a literal sense, to mean that had horns on his head, and, on this basis, Michelangelo, in his statue of Moshe, depicted him as having horns. Interestingly, while this notion of Jews having horns has been taken in a diabolical sense and served as a basis of anti-Semitism, I once saw a book on art history, “The Horned Image of Moses,” in which the author writes that, originally, horns were used, in art, as an indication of honor, so that this depiction of Moshe was not meant, at first, in a pejorative sense. In any case, we need to understand the significance of the beams of light shining from Moshe, and why they appeared only now, with the giving of the second set of luchos.

The rabbis tell us that the beams of light represented the ink left over in the quill after Moshe wrote the Torah on parchment. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the author of the Tanya, explained that this extra ink refers to the learning of Moshe that he was unable to articulate, but that permeated his being. This is true of every true teacher. No matter how great he is, he can never give over the full breadth of his knowledge. I believe that this sense of Moshe’s totality being greater than the sum of his explicit teachings is an important aspect of him that impacts on the nature of the second set of luchos, which served as a corrective to the tragedy of the eigel, that occurred after the first set given to Moshe.

Rav Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, the Rav of Brisk known as the Beis HaLevi, writes that the major difference between the first and second luchos is that the first luchos incorporated the oral law, while the second luchos necessitated human intellectual effort to derive the oral law from the written law. This reflects the fact that, as Rav Saadia Gaon and Ibn Ezra note, the first luchos were both carved out and written by God, while the second luchos were carved out by Moshe and written by God. My teacher, Rav Aharon Soloveitchik, zt”l, a great grandson of the Beis HaLevi, added that this process of deriving the oral law required a certain measure of “shimush talmid chacham” serving Torah scholars, which was typified by Moshe’s faithful student, Yehoshua. After all, it was the absence of Moshe from the scene that led to the incident of the eigel, and the second luchos were meant to help prevent this from happening again. Close contact with the Torah scholar adds new dimensions to the learning experience that cannot be attained otherwise. According to Rav Dovid Feinstein, having close contact allows one to observe the comportment of the teacher in many life circumstances which he would, through formal teaching alone, not be aware of. Rav Tzvi Yehudah Kook wrote in an introduction to the study of Mesilas Yesharim, that by serving the Torah scholar the student gets to know his personality and thereby better understand his teachings in general. Following the explanations we have seen of the light coming from Moshe’s face, we can add that contact with, and service of, the Torah scholar, enables one to experience something of the teacher’s total essence, the aspect of his wisdom that cannot be articulated in words. In order to get a real sense of him, as Rav Aharon said, one needs to have contact with a true, living Torah scholar, whose being is permeated with the totality of Torah, and emits, in his own way, the kind of light that emitted from Moshe’s face.