The centerpiece of Parashat Yitro is when the nation of Israel receives the Torah. This event, together with the nation’s preparation for it, led the rabbinic sages to discuss the mental process and religious consciousness of the people as they agreed to take this step and accept the Torah. The Gemara in Massekhet Shabbat (88a) devotes significant attention to the fundamental questions that arise from this event. These questions include issues of force (the Gemara suggests that the mountain was held over them, threatening them with destruction if they did not agree) and free will (they accepted it willingly in the time of Ahasuerus), questions about the need for commandments (when Moshe was atop the mountain), questions regarding obedience, and so forth.
Perhaps the most powerful question of all those discussed in the Gemara deals with the relationship between innocence and recklessness, between innocence and wisdom. This problem arises from the response of the nation of Israel to the offer of the Torah, a response of unreserved acceptance: na’ase ve-nishma – “We will do and we will listen.”
Throughout history, over many generations, Jewish education has empowered its students to examine, to question, to ask, to challenge. “Jewish wisdom” is a well-worn myth that is accepted as fact by literature that presents Jews as intelligent, as able to always examine a problem from a different vantage point. This “Talmudic thinking,” an approach that makes use of dialogue to unearth approaches that were not obvious to the student earlier in the discussion, is described by Primo Levi in the following conversation that appears in his novel “If Not Now, When?”
“Pavel interrupted him. “I’ll explain what the Talmud is to you, with an example. Now listen carefully: Two chimneysweeps fall down the flue of a chimney; one comes out all covered with soot, the other comes out clean: which of the two goes to wash himself?”
Suspecting a trap, Piotr looked around, as if seeking help. Then he plucked up his courage and answered: “The one who’s dirty goes to wash.”
“Wrong,” Pavel said. “The one who’s dirty sees the other man’s face, and it’s clean, so he thinks he’s clean, too. Instead, the clean one sees the soot on the other one’s face, believes he’s dirty himself, and goes to wash. You understand?”
“I understand. That makes sense.”
“But wait; I haven’t finished the example. Now I’ll ask you a second question. Those two chimneysweeps fall a second time down the same flue, and again one is dirty and one isn’t. Which one goes to wash?”
“I told you I understand. The clean one goes to wash.”
“Wrong,” Pavel said mercilessly. “When he washed after the first fall, the clean man saw that the water in his basin didn’t get dirty, and the dirty man realized why the clean man had gone to wash. So, this time, the dirty chimneysweep went and washed.”
Piotr listened to this, with his mouth open, half in fright and half in curiosity.
“And now the third question. The pair falls down the flue a third time. Which of the two goes to wash?”
“From now on, the dirty one will go and wash,”
“Wrong again. Did you ever hear of two men falling down the same flue and one remaining clean while the other got dirty? There, that’s what the Talmud is like.”
This fictitious scenario is similar to what we actually come across in the Gemara embodied in such characters as Geviha ben Pesisa who consistently comes up with “out-of-the-box” answers (see Sanhedrin 91a) or the famous Hershele, the student of R. Baruch of Medzhybizh, who becomes the archetype Jewish comedian, reflecting the ability of the Jew to adopt a clever perspective on any simple situation, to answer a question with a question of his own, etc.
In light of all this, the encounter with the innocence of na’ase ve-nishma – “We will do and we will listen” – as a formative response to receiving the Torah, requires explanation.
Emmanuel Levinas describes this innocence when he writes:
“The truth of the Torah is given without any precursor, without first announcing itself in its idea, without announcing itself in its “essay,” in its rough draft. It is the ripe fruit which is given and thus taken and not that which can be offered to the childish hand, groping and exploring” (Nine Talmudic Readings, The Temptation of Temptations, p. 65).
Levinas is suggesting that the good of the Torah is so simple that deliberating about it would just be foolish. The acceptance of the Torah is not due to recklessness, it is due to simple belief, to the ability to immediately recognize the virtue of the Torah and to dismiss all considerations and hesitations. The Torah is not an antique clock with a complicated mechanism that begs to be taken apart in order to figure out what makes it tick. The Torah comes as a ripe fruit placed before you, which is entirely perfect in its nature and does not require study and investigation.
The description of the Torah as a ripe and eye-catching fruit fits in well with the desire to reveal its simplicity, the sublime aspiration of every Torah scholar: to peel away the coverings and add-ons, and to find the word of God hidden under the piles of superfluous explanations and expositions that have moved the Torah far from the true intent of God. It is easy to be swept away by the river of interpretations that have flowed far from their source. R. Yosef Kara, in his commentary to the Book of Shmuel, writes that the peshat – the simple meaning – is not merely a lifebuoy for the desperate swimmer in the sea of the Torah, rather it is the safety of dry land that the swimmer has been seeking:
“Whosoever does not know the simple meaning of the text and seeks the midrashic explanation, is like someone who has been swept away by a flowing river and from the depths of overwhelming waters reaches up for anything to grab onto to save himself. Had he truly devoted himself to clarifying the word of God, he would have worked on understanding the straightforward meaning of the matter” (1 Shmuel 1:17).
Uncovering the simple meaning is the greatest innovation that can be found in the Beit Midrash – not only in the study of the written Torah, which is what R. Yosef Kara is discussing, but also in the study of Talmud and Jewish law, and in all subjects of Torah study. “But, see, this I did find: God made men plain, but they have engaged in too much reasoning” (Kohelet 7:29). This is the essential foundation of the Torah – the adoption of common sense and healthy, straightforward logic. In the view of the Rambam, this pure and simple wisdom is the definition of prophecy and revelation – this is the experience of Mount Sinai.