The scene is quite familiar to us, and somehow it rings in our ears as an act linked to anger.
It is true, this is how the text of the Torah puts it. And yet, beyond the literalness, we could discover in that untimely act of Moses a hint of growth, an attempt to discover that, beyond the quarrels, among what breaks can be found the ideal material to strengthen a solid construction.
Let me explain a bit. We are in chapter 32 of the book of Exodus and the story is well known: in the eyes of the people, Moses is delayed on Mount Sinai. They lose sight of him, he does not come down, and in such insipid anxiety they decide to replace him with a golden calf cast on the spot.
Meanwhile, at the top of the mountain, Moses receives the two tablets of the law with the 10 commandments and when he descends he finds his people surrendered before a golden idol, dancing around it, and then he only manages to break the tablets.
This unconsulted act on the part of the prophet puts us before an inescapable mystery. Who knows? Perhaps that act secretly included a didactic objective. Which? Teaching us that what flirts with the perfect should not be a source of transcendence in the human. In fact, the first tablets that Moses carried in his hands were “God’s writing” and the second tablets that God himself will ask him to carve will be a mixed product: the result of a partnership between God and being. human. This sacred mixture could thus become the most wonderful result, not necessarily sought after, from whom he was encouraged to break a divine gift.
Those tables well broken by Moses show that the perfect is not the patrimony of the human. They denote that what is broken, what is fragile, what is broken, has a much more powerful humanity. They insist that our role is more like seekers of pieces of a puzzle than heirs of the completeness, than depositaries of the totality.
The second tables with which we are still carving are the faithful testimony that the task involves adherence to the law, the forging of fraternity and the fulfillment of a pact that in a certain way includes all of us.
*Rabbi, member of the Interreligious Committee for Peace (Comipaz)