One Born of Woman

מָה־אֱנוֹשׁ כִּי־תִזְכְּרֶנּוּ וּבֶן־אָדָם כִּי תִפְקְדֶנּוּ

"What is man, that You are mindful of him, and the son of man, that You think of him?" (Psalms 8:5)

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Suppose something precious has to be placed somewhere. A manuscript that exists in one copy; a stone worth a kingdom. You would look for the safest keeping you could find: the steadiest hands, the cleanest record, the place where nothing can go wrong. You would not give it to someone who you already know will drop it.

The angels thought so too. In the last scene of the passage these essays have followed, Moses climbs to heaven to receive the Torah, and the angels object. The Torah is God's hidden treasure, older than the world. They are the beings who never sin, never tire, never die. The man on the stairs is flesh and blood. The argument they make is the sensible one, the one any of us would make about the manuscript and the stone. And they lose. They lose to the opposite argument, made by a frightened man holding on to the throne of God. It is one of the most brilliant arguments in the Talmud: the Torah belongs to the people who will drop it. This essay, the last in the series, is about why.

The text

The whole scene is told by Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, the same sage whose sayings closed the previous essay.¹

בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁעָלָה מֹשֶׁה לַמָּרוֹם אָמְרוּ מַלְאֲכֵי הַשָּׁרֵת לִפְנֵי הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא: רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם, מַה לִּילוּד אִשָּׁה בֵּינֵינוּ? אָמַר לָהֶן: לְקַבֵּל תּוֹרָה בָּא. אָמְרוּ לְפָנָיו: חֶמְדָּה גְּנוּזָה שֶׁגְּנוּזָה לָךְ תְּשַׁע מֵאוֹת וְשִׁבְעִים וְאַרְבָּעָה דּוֹרוֹת קוֹדֶם שֶׁנִּבְרָא הָעוֹלָם, אַתָּה מְבַקֵּשׁ לִיתְּנָהּ לְבָשָׂר וָדָם?

When Moses ascended on high, the ministering angels said before the Holy One, blessed be He: Master of the Universe, what is one born of woman doing among us? He said to them: He has come to receive the Torah. They said before Him: The hidden treasure, which You kept hidden for nine hundred and seventy-four generations before the world was created — You seek to give it to flesh and blood?

And they quote Scripture at Him, Psalm 8: "What is man, that You are mindful of him? … O Lord our God, how majestic is Your name in all the earth, You who have set Your majesty upon the heavens." Set Your majesty upon the heavens: the Torah's place, they are saying, is here.²

God does not answer them. He turns to Moses: give them an answer. And Moses says something no other figure in this passage has said out loud: I am afraid.

אָמַר לְפָנָיו: רִבּוֹנוֹ שֶׁל עוֹלָם, מִתְיָירֵא אֲנִי שֶׁמָּא יִשְׂרְפוּנִי בַּהֶבֶל שֶׁבְּפִיהֶם. אָמַר לוֹ: אֱחוֹז בְּכִסֵּא כְבוֹדִי וַחֲזוֹר לָהֶן תְּשׁוּבָה

He said before Him: Master of the Universe, I fear they will burn me with the breath of their mouths. He said to him: Hold on to My throne of glory, and give them an answer.

Holding the throne, Moses asks: Master of the Universe, this Torah You are giving me, what is written in it? "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt." He turns to the angels:

אָמַר לָהֶן: לְמִצְרַיִם יְרַדְתֶּם? לְפַרְעֹה הִשְׁתַּעְבַּדְתֶּם? תּוֹרָה לָמָּה תְּהֵא לָכֶם!

He said to them: Did you go down to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? Why should the Torah be yours?

And so on, commandment by commandment. What else is written in it? "You shall have no other gods": do you live among idol-worshipping nations? "Remember the Sabbath day": do you do work, that you need rest? "You shall not swear falsely": do you do business with one another? "Honor your father and your mother": do you have a father and mother? "You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal": is there jealousy among you? Is there an evil inclination among you?

Immediately, the Talmud says, they conceded, and praised Moses's answer with his own proof. They repeated the opening of Psalm 8, "O Lord our God, how majestic is Your name in all the earth," and this time did not say "set Your majesty upon the heavens." Then each angel became his friend and gave him something, a parting gift. Even the Angel of Death gave him something: the secret of the incense that stops a plague, which Moses would one day use, through Aaron, to stand "between the dead and the living" (Numbers 17:12–13). If the Angel of Death had not told him, the Talmud asks, how would he have known?³

The passage adds a sequel. When Moses came down with the Torah, Satan came before God and asked: Master of the Universe, where is the Torah? He was sent to the earth, and the earth said, "God alone understands its way" (Job 28:23). He went to the sea, and the sea said, "It is not with me." He went to the deep, and the deep said, "It is not in me." He came back: I have searched the whole earth and not found it. Go, said God, to the son of Amram. Satan went to Moses: where is the Torah that God gave you? And Moses said: who am I, that the Holy One should have given me the Torah? God challenges the denial: Moses, are you a deceiver? And Moses answers: You have a hidden treasure You delight in every day. Shall I take the credit for myself?

אָמַר לוֹ הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא לְמֹשֶׁה: הוֹאִיל וּמִיעַטְתָּ עַצְמְךָ — תִּקָּרֵא עַל שִׁמְךָ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״זִכְרוּ תּוֹרַת מֹשֶׁה עַבְדִּי״

The Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses: Since you made yourself small — it will be called by your name, as it is said: "Remember the Torah of Moses, My servant" (Malachi 3:22).

It is the last exchange in the passage, and the Torah has carried his name ever since.

The lessons

This scene leaves several things unexplained. Why does God, who could silence the angels with a word, tell Moses to answer them? Why must Moses hold the throne to do it? Why does the argument work, when the angels' case, the perfect keeping for the perfect gift, seems so obviously right? Why does every angel, including the Angel of Death, give Moses a present on his way out? And why does the Torah end up named for the one man who denied having any claim to it? I think the scene answers all the questions we asked: the Torah was made for people as the angels described them, and they are the ones who will have to keep it.

1. The argument from imperfection

What does Moses actually do? He does not praise humanity. He does not argue that people are worthier than they look, or that they will rise to the occasion. He concedes the angels' whole description and then reads the document.

Every commandment he quotes assumes a flaw. "I brought you out of Egypt" assumes slavery. "No other gods" assumes the pull of idols. Shabbat assumes exhaustion. The oath assumes commerce, and commerce assumes the temptation to lie. Honoring parents assumes birth, childhood, dependence, and the impatience of grown children. And the last three assume the worst of us: jealousy, appetite, the yetzer hara, the inclination to do wrong. Do you have any of that, he asks the angels. They have none of it. That is precisely their argument, and he turns it around: then the Torah has nothing to say to you. Its every line is addressed to a creature who can fail. A being who cannot covet does not need "you shall not covet"; a being who cannot lie does not need the truth commanded.

The angels wanted the Torah kept safe, like the manuscript in the vault. Moses answers that the Torah is not a treasure of that kind. It is closer to a medicine, and a medicine stored where no one is sick is not being honored. It is being wasted. The Torah is not degraded by being handed to flesh and blood. Flesh and blood is what it is about. Every "you shall not" in it is a portrait of us, and a claim that we can do otherwise. Law is addressed only to those who could break it. That means every commandment is also a statement of trust. The angels concede not because Moses out-argued them but because he read the text, and the text was not about them.⁴

2. Hold on to My throne

But before any of that, there is the strange exchange at the start. The angels object to God; God tells Moses to answer them. Why? God does not need a spokesman. One word from Him and the objection is over.

Because the answer would not mean the same thing coming from Him. The question on the table is whether human beings can be trusted with the Torah, and there is only one way to settle it: a human being has to stand in heaven and make the case. If God overrules the angels, the Torah comes down by decree, and the angels' doubt survives untouched. When a man answers them, the answer is itself the evidence. Here is one born of woman, standing among the fires, arguing Scripture, and winning. The case for humanity had to be made by the defendant.

And the defendant is afraid, and says so. Moses's first word in heaven is not the argument; it is "I fear they will burn me." The Talmud does not treat the fear as a failure. God does not tell him there is nothing to be afraid of. He gives him something to hold: hold on to My throne of glory, and answer. Rabbi Nachum adds that God spread the cloud of His presence over him.⁵ The picture is exact. The truth about the earth can be spoken in heaven, but not by a man standing on his own; only by a man holding on to God and speaking anyway. That is a fair description of prayer, and of every other time a human being has said a true and necessary thing while shaking. Courage, in this scene, is not the absence of fear and not the hiding of it. It is fear, plus a grip. Moses's fear, and the throne he is told to hold, already contain his answer to the angels. The Torah is kept by a frightened human being holding on to God. It was never going to be kept by anyone else.

3. The gifts, and the name

Then the angels lose the argument, and what do they do? Each one becomes his friend and gives him something. The Talmud reads it out of a verse: "You ascended on high, you took captives, you took gifts among men" (Psalms 68:19), because they called you adam, man. The word that opened the scene as an insult, one born of woman, ends the scene as the reason for the presents. Once the angels see that the Torah is safest in human hands, they turn to help the humans who will have to keep it. That is what the gifts are: each angel hands Moses something for the trouble that is sure to come.

Even the Angel of Death gives a gift, and the Talmud lingers on it, because it is the sharpest version of the whole argument. What the Angel of Death hands over is the secret of stopping death: the incense with which Aaron, in the wilderness, would stand between the dead and the living and halt a plague. The angel of the grave, conceding, gives humanity a tool against the grave. That is what it looks like when heaven stops guarding the treasure and starts helping the ones who hold it.

And then the quiet sequel, which answers the question the whole series has circled. Satan searches for the Torah: not in the earth, not in the sea, not in the deep. The Torah, once given, has no address except a person. "Go to the son of Amram." It does not live in a place, even a holy place; it lives in whoever carries it. And when Satan arrives, the man who out-argued the angels says: who am I, that God should have given me the Torah? God names the denial for what it is, and rewards it with the greatest honor in the tradition: torat Moshe, the Torah of Moses, named forever after the man who said it was not his.

The two halves, together, are the passage's final teaching about receiving. The only hands that can safely hold the Torah are hands that know they are not worthy of it. Moses wins the Torah by pointing at human weakness, and is named its owner for refusing to claim it. Pride would have proved the angels right. What proves them wrong, in the end, is not human strength. It is a man who is afraid and argues anyway, and who, holding the greatest gift ever given, says: who am I?

Coda

The Talmud tells one more small story about that visit to heaven. Moses arrives and finds God tying small crowns onto the letters of the Torah, the little strokes that scribes draw to this day. Moses stands silent. God says: Moses, is there no greeting in your city? Do people not say hello? Moses answers: does a servant greet his Master? And God says: still, you might have helped Me, you might have wished My work well. At once Moses says the words of the verse: "And now, may the power of the Lord be great, as You have spoken" (Numbers 14:17).

It is a strange, tender scene, and it belongs at the end of this series. The God of these five essays has held a mountain over a people, made creation conditional, spoken words that stopped hearts, and defended the gift of the Torah against His own angels. And here He is asking a human being for a greeting, and for a blessing on His work. As if the whole enterprise, from the mountain onward, had been aimed at this: not obedience, which the angels could have supplied, but company.

Five essays, one question: what does it mean to receive the Torah? Under the mountain, it meant having no real choice, and ratifying the choice freely a thousand years later. In the conditional creation, it meant holding up the world. In "we will do and we will hear," it meant trusting before understanding. In the seventy tongues, it meant hearing one word the way only you can hear it. And in the argument of Moses it means this: the Torah is ours not although we fail but because we are the kind of creature that fails, and can be commanded, and can stand up trembling, holding on to something greater, and answer. That is what Shavuot celebrates, every year, as if the question were being asked again. It is.

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Notes

1. The entire sequence, from the angels' objection through Satan's search and the crowns on the letters, is a chain of teachings of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, the early third-century sage of Lydda whose sayings about the perfume, the souls, and the twelve mil closed the previous essay. The tradition remembers him as the sage who spoke with the Angel of Death more than once, which gives the gift in this passage a certain fittingness.
2. The count of 974 generations comes from Psalm 105:8, "the word He commanded to a thousand generations." The Torah was given, by the traditional count, in the twenty-sixth generation from Adam. If it was commanded for a thousand, the missing nine hundred and seventy-four generations must have preceded the world; the Torah waited, hidden, through all of them. The angels' two verses are Psalm 8:5 and 8:2, and the debate turns on the psalm's own ambiguity: it begins with God's name "in all the earth," and only then says "You who have set Your majesty upon the heavens." When the angels concede, the Talmud notes, they recite the first phrase and leave the second unsaid.
3. Numbers 17 tells how, after the rebellion of Korach, a plague broke out and Moses told Aaron to take the fire-pan with incense and carry it into the midst of the congregation: "and he stood between the dead and the living, and the plague was stopped." No commandment anywhere prescribes incense against plague. That, says the Talmud, is the point: "If the Angel of Death had not told him, how would he have known?"
4. The argument has one more edge worth noticing. The angels are not wrong that the Torah is older than the world and belongs, in origin, to heaven; the second essay in this series stood on that very claim. Moses does not deny the Torah's origin. He argues about its address. A letter is written in one place and sent to another, and it belongs, in the end, to the one whose name is on it. Every "who brought you out of Egypt" names the addressee. What happened generations later, when heaven itself tried to reclaim a word of the Torah in a human study hall, and lost again, is told elsewhere on this site, in "Not in Heaven" (the oven of Achnai).
5. The proof text is Job 26:9. In its plain sense the verse says that God "shuts off the view of the throne, spreading His cloud over it." The Talmud reads it as "He makes him hold the front of the throne," and Rabbi Nachum adds that God spread the radiance of His presence and His cloud over Moses, so that the man in heaven stands wrapped in something of heaven while he speaks for the earth.