We Will Do, and We Will Hear

וַיִּקַּח סֵפֶר הַבְּרִית וַיִּקְרָא בְּאָזְנֵי הָעָם וַיֹּאמְרוּ כֹּל אֲשֶׁר־דִּבֶּר ה׳ נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמָע

"And he took the book of the covenant and read it in the hearing of the people, and they said: All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will hear." (Exodus 24:7)

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Would you sign a contract without reading it?

Most of us would say no, and we would be right. But there are people for whom we might. A parent. A friend of forty years. Someone whose judgment we trust more than our own reading. Sign here, they say, and we sign, and we ask what it was afterward. That is not carelessness. It is a kind of knowledge, knowledge of the person, which stands in for knowledge of the document.

The first two essays in this series were about pressure from above: a mountain held over the people's heads, a creation that would be unmade if they refused. This essay is about the people's answer. Before the Torah was given, Exodus says, Moses read the covenant aloud, and the people answered with two words the Talmud never tired of repeating: na'aseh ve-nishma. We will do, and we will hear. In that order. Commit first; understand later. The sages of Shabbat 88a–b praise those two words as the finest thing Israel ever said. Then they let a heretic walk into the study hall and call the whole thing reckless, to a rabbi's face, while the rabbi's fingers are bleeding. And then they turn to what happened forty days after Sinai, at the foot of the same mountain, with a calf of gold. This is the essay about whether commitment before understanding is the wisest thing a person can do or the most foolish. The Talmud manages to say: both.

The text

The two words come from Exodus 24, a chapter the sages read as describing the day before the revelation. So the people accepted the covenant before they heard a single commandment.¹ On that acceptance the Talmud says:

דָּרַשׁ רַבִּי סִימַאי: בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁהִקְדִּימוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל ״נַעֲשֶׂה״ לְ״נִשְׁמָע״ בָּאוּ שִׁשִּׁים רִיבּוֹא שֶׁל מַלְאֲכֵי הַשָּׁרֵת, לְכׇל אֶחָד וְאֶחָד מִיִּשְׂרָאֵל קָשְׁרוּ לוֹ שְׁנֵי כְתָרִים, אֶחָד כְּנֶגֶד ״נַעֲשֶׂה״ וְאֶחָד כְּנֶגֶד ״נִשְׁמָע״

Rabbi Simai taught: When Israel put "we will do" before "we will hear," six hundred thousand ministering angels came, and to each and every one of Israel they tied two crowns, one for "we will do" and one for "we will hear."

Six hundred thousand is the number of the men who left Egypt: one angel per person, two crowns per head. And then, without pause, the other half. When Israel sinned with the golden calf, twice that number of angels of destruction came down and stripped the crowns off. The Talmud finds this in the verse that says the people, in mourning after the calf, "stripped themselves of their ornaments from Mount Horeb" (Exodus 33:6). At Horeb they were crowned, says Rabbi Chama son of Rabbi Chanina, and at Horeb they were stripped.²

Then a second saying about the same moment:

אָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר: בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁהִקְדִּימוּ יִשְׂרָאֵל ״נַעֲשֶׂה״ לְ״נִשְׁמָע״ יָצְתָה בַּת קוֹל וְאָמְרָה לָהֶן: מִי גִּלָּה לְבָנַי רָז זֶה שֶׁמַּלְאֲכֵי הַשָּׁרֵת מִשְׁתַּמְּשִׁין בּוֹ?

Rabbi Elazar said: When Israel put "we will do" before "we will hear," a heavenly voice went out and said to them: Who revealed to My children this secret that the ministering angels use?

The proof is a verse in Psalms about the angels themselves: "Bless the Lord, you His angels, mighty in strength, who do His word, to hear the voice of His word" (103:20). Doing first, hearing after. The order of the two words at Sinai, says the voice, is the order of the angels' own existence. And Rabbi Chama adds the image that has stayed with the passage ever since: why is Israel compared to an apple tree (Song of Songs 2:3)? Because just as the apple tree's fruit comes before its leaves, so Israel put "we will do" before "we will hear."³

Then the tone changes.

הָהוּא מִינָא דְּחַזְיֵיהּ לְרָבָא דְּקָא מְעַיֵּין בִּשְׁמַעְתָּא, וְיָתְבָה אֶצְבְּעָתָא דִידֵיהּ תּוּתֵי כַּרְעָא וְקָא מָיֵיץ בְּהוּ, וְקָא מַבְּעָן אֶצְבְּעָתֵיהּ דְּמָא. אֲמַר לֵיהּ: עַמָּא פְּזִיזָא, דְּקַדְּמִיתוּ פּוּמַּיְיכוּ לְאוּדְנַיְיכוּ

A certain heretic saw Rava absorbed in a point of law, his fingers pressed under his leg, grinding them, and his fingers were spurting blood. He said to him: Impulsive people, who put your mouths before your ears — you still stand by your impulsiveness!

You should have listened first, the man goes on. If you could bear it, accept; if not, do not. It is a fair point, made cruelly.⁴ Rava is so deep in the argument that he has not noticed his own blood, and the heretic says: that is exactly what is wrong with you, and it has been wrong with you since Sinai. Rava answers with a verse: "We, who walked in wholeness, of us it is written: 'The integrity of the upright shall guide them.' Those who walk in crookedness, of them it is written: 'the perverseness of the faithless shall destroy them'" (Proverbs 11:3).

And then, as if the heretic had touched something true, the Talmud turns to the calf. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani, in the name of Rabbi Yonatan, reads the verse "You have captured my heart, my sister, my bride; you have captured my heart with one of your eyes" (Song of Songs 4:9): at first, with one of your eyes; when you do, with both your eyes. Ulla says the hard line of the passage: "Shameless is the bride who is unfaithful under her own wedding canopy." Israel, forty days after Sinai, dancing around a calf. Rav Mari finds the verse: "While the king was still at his table, my spikenard gave forth its scent" (Song of Songs 1:12), the perfume turning while the wedding feast was still laid. And then Rav says the line that rescues the whole passage:

אָמַר רַב: וַעֲדַיִין חַבִּיבוּתָא הִיא גַּבַּן, דִּכְתִיב ״נָתַן״, וְלָא כְּתִיב ״הִסְרִיחַ״

Rav said: And still the affection is with us — for it is written "gave forth," and not "stank."

The section closes with a teaching of the sages: those who are insulted and do not insult, who hear their shame and do not answer, who act out of love, of them the verse says, "And those who love Him are as the sun going forth in its might" (Judges 5:31). The word for "insulted," aluvin, is the word Ulla used for the bride: aluvah. The passage that began by calling Israel shameless ends by praising those who bear shame in silence.

The lessons

This passage praises the people, then turns on them, and that alone raises questions. Why should saying "we will do" before "we will hear" deserve not one crown but two? What is the second crown for? And why did six hundred thousand angels tie the crowns on, two crowns to a pair of hands, while twice that number came to take them off, one crown each? If a heavenly voice calls the order the angels' own secret, why does the Talmud let a heretic call it impulsiveness? And why does it show us Rava, at that very moment, bleeding without noticing? Why does the passage go straight from the people's finest hour to their worst, forty days apart? And why is the bride shameless in one line and still loved in the next? I think the passage is a single argument about the nature of commitment: that the deepest kind comes before understanding, that this is both its glory and its danger, and that what makes it safe in the end is not knowledge but love.

1. What the second crown is for

The number is the first surprise. Rabbi Simai does not say the angels tied one crown for saying the words in the right order. He says two: one for "we will do," one for "we will hear." The doing is rewarded, and so is the hearing. Why should "we will hear" earn anything? Everyone listens.

Because nishma, placed second, is not the same word it would have been placed first. "We will hear, then do" means: show us the terms, and we will decide. "We will do, then hear" means: we are already yours; now teach us. The second hearing is not a buyer checking the terms. It is the attention of someone who has already said yes and wants to understand what she has said yes to. Commitment without the wish to understand is blind obedience. Understanding without prior commitment is shopping. Sinai was neither. It was a people giving themselves first and then asking to be taught.

That is also what the heavenly voice means by calling the order the angels' secret. The verse in Psalms has the angels do His word and then hear it. An angel does not deliberate. There is no gap, in an angel, between being addressed and answering. Human beings have the gap. It is where our freedom lives, and also our hesitation, our bargaining, our "let me think about it." What the voice marvels at is that, for one moment, a whole people closed the gap and answered the way angels answer.

We know this order from our own lives. The largest commitments most people make, to a marriage, to a child, to a calling, are made before we can possibly understand what they will ask of us. Nobody knows what a marriage is until they have been in one for years. Nobody knows what a child will cost. We say "we will do" to these things, and we spend the rest of our lives in the hearing. The sages are saying this is not a defect in how humans commit. It is how the best commitments are made.

2. Why the Talmud kept the taunt

And then the Talmud does something brave. It lets the other side speak.

The heretic sees Rava so absorbed in an argument of Torah that his fingers are bleeding and he has not noticed, and he says: that is your people. You agreed before you listened, and you are still not listening, not even to your own body. Reckless. You should have asked what was in the contract.

The Talmud does not make him a fool. His observation is accurate: Rava is bleeding. His principle is one every sensible person holds: read before you sign. And the Talmud has just spent a page praising the opposite. Why keep this scene?

Because the praise is not safe without the challenge. A tradition that only said "commit first, understand later" would be teaching blind trust. It would produce people who can be led anywhere. The heretic's voice is a question the Talmud was willing to face. It is saying: we know how this looks from outside. We know that doing before hearing can turn into fanaticism. We know that a man too deep in study to feel his own blood could be a picture of devotion or a picture of blindness, and that the two can be hard to tell apart.

Rava's answer, read with Rashi's explanation, is not "you are wrong that we signed unread." It is: we knew whom we were signing with. "We walked with Him in wholeness of heart," Rashi explains, "in the way of those who act out of love, and we trusted Him not to lay on us anything we could not bear." You can do before you hear when the one asking has just carried you out of Egypt and through the sea. The people were not signing blind. They were signing on the strength of everything they knew about the one who was asking. The heretic is right about anyone who commits to something he has no reason to trust. He is wrong about this people and this God. The difference is not a detail. It is the whole of the matter.

3. Forty days later, and the gentle word

Then the calf. The Talmud does not let us stay at the crowning. It goes straight to the stripping: the same mountain, the same people, the ornaments of Sinai taken off in mourning for what they had done.

Count the angels. Six hundred thousand came to crown the people, and each tied two crowns. Twice that number came to strip them, and each carried away only one. The Tosafot explain it by strength: an angel of destruction is the weaker kind, and one crown is all it can manage. The numbers say something else too. The crowns were tied on together, by one pair of hands, because "we will do" and "we will hear" were one sentence and one act. They did not come off together. Each crown needed its own angel, because each can be lost by itself. A person can keep the promise and stop wanting to understand it. That is the fanatic, the thing the heretic saw in Rava. A person can keep the wish to understand and let the promise go. That is a reader with nothing at stake in what he reads. The calf cost the people both crowns. But it took two angels to undo what one had done. A commitment made in one moment does not come apart in one moment. It loosens in stages, and a person can be halfway out without noticing.

This is the heretic's point proved, and the Talmud concedes it. Commitment before understanding is glorious, and it is fragile. A people that said yes in a moment of complete trust could say yes to something else forty days later, when Moses was late coming down and the trust wavered.⁵ The yes was real. But a yes that has not yet grown into understanding, into habit, into a life, can be lost in an afternoon. The apple tree's fruit comes before its leaves, and fruit without leaves is exposed.

Rabbi Yonatan's verse says it precisely. "You have captured my heart with one of your eyes." The acceptance at Sinai won God's heart with one eye, the yes. "When you do, with both your eyes." The second eye is the doing: the years of keeping, the Torah lived until it is no longer a promise but a character. The calf happened between the first eye and the second. And Ulla's line, shameless is the bride who strays under her own canopy, is meant to hurt. The Talmud does not excuse the calf.

Then Rav says the line the whole passage has been moving toward. The verse that records the betrayal, "my spikenard gave forth its scent," could have used an ugly word. It chose a gentle one. Gave forth, not stank. And Rav hears in that choice the answer to everything the heretic said and everything the calf proved. The bride strayed under the canopy. The groom did not leave. The verse that records her failure is written in the language of someone who still loves her.

That is the safety that makes doing-before-hearing possible. Not that the people would never fail; they failed almost at once. It is that the one they committed to, when they failed, described the failure in the gentlest word available and kept them. You can say "we will do" before "we will hear" to a God like that. You cannot say it to anyone else. And the closing teaching turns the accusation over: the aluvah, the shameless bride, becomes the aluvin, the people who are insulted and stay silent and act out of love. The same word, turned from accusation into strength. That turning is what the sages thought had happened to Israel between the calf and their own day. They said "we will do" once, in a moment of trust. They have been in the hearing ever since.

Coda

Rava is still sitting there at the end of this, with his fingers bleeding and a heretic standing over him. The Talmud never says whether he noticed. I like to think he did not: that he answered with his verse and went back to the argument, and the blood dried, and the man walked away shaking his head at a people that would not learn to read before signing.

He was right that they would not. They had signed before the mountain burned, on the strength of what they knew of the one who was asking. They were crowned for it, stripped for it, called shameless for it, and kept anyway. Every generation since has done the same thing in its own way: taken on the Torah before it understood it, and spent a lifetime in the hearing. That is not recklessness. It is what it looks like to love someone first and learn them afterward, and to find, over and over, in the gentlest words the text can find, that you were not wrong.

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Notes

1. In the Torah's order the words come in Exodus 24, after the Ten Commandments. The sages read the chapter as earlier: on Shabbat 88a itself the covenant of Exodus 24 is placed on the fifth of Sivan, the day before the revelation. So in the Talmud's telling the people accepted sight unseen, before the fire. That is also why the mountain of the first essay puzzled the commentators: why compel a people that had already said this? The answers of the Tosafot and the Maharal were given there.
2. The count of the angels, and the answer from strength, are the Tosafot's. Rabbi Yochanan adds that Moses was found worthy and took all the crowns, and Rashi connects this to the light of his face when he came down the mountain the second time. And Reish Lakish ends the section with a promise: in the future the Holy One will return them to us, as it is said, "and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads" (Isaiah 35:10), the joy that was once upon their heads.
3. The apple tree gave later commentators trouble. Rabbenu Tam, in the Tosafot, objected that real apple trees grow like every other tree, leaves first, and proposed that the tapuach of the Song of Songs is the citron, the etrog, whose last year's fruit is still on the branch when the new leaves come.
4. The min, usually translated "heretic" or "sectarian," was a Bible-reader who read Scripture against the sages: the word covered Christians, Gnostics, and others. Rava's Babylonia, under Persian rule, was full of such encounters, and the Talmud records several. The speakers of this passage span the whole rabbinic world: Rabbi Simai taught around the year 200; Rabbi Elazar ben Pedat, Rabbi Chama son of Rabbi Chanina, Rabbi Yonatan, and his student Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachmani were sages of the land of Israel in the third century; Rav founded the academy of Sura in Babylonia around 220; Ulla traveled between the two lands; Rava, whom we met in the first essay, headed the academy of Mechoza in the fourth century.
5. The Talmud itself, a page later (Shabbat 89a), explains how the trust broke. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi reads "the people saw that Moses delayed [boshesh]" (Exodus 32:1) as ba'u shesh, "the sixth hour has come." Moses had said: in forty days, at the beginning of the sixth hour, I return. On the fortieth day Satan confused the world, told the people the hour had passed and Moses was dead, and, when they paid no attention, showed them an image of his deathbed. Only then did they go to Aaron. In the Talmud's own telling, the calf did not begin as a change of heart. It began as grief, worked on by a forged image.