Dear members and friends,

It was nice to come back to Greenport, to budding trees and bushes. With Purim behind us and Passover ahead, it’s time for us to get ready for spring — to take off the Purim masks and begin clearing out the rising agent in our leavened selves. It’s time to remember how long the road to freedom can be and how hard it often is to navigate.

Passover is a holiday that connects generations. Although many Jewish generations were shaped by a common text, more importantly, they are shaped by the interpretation of each generation that raised them — each generation with its own challenges, each generation with only a short time to make its mark. In a Midrash on the Book of Ecclesiastes (1:13), the rabbis tell us that a person leaves this world without even half of his or her wants accomplished. Whenever I travel abroad, I’m reminded of this thought — how much we try to accomplish in such a short time.

We recently read in Parashat Ki Tisa (Exodus 32:19) about Moses going up to Mount Sinai to receive the tablets of Torah. While he was gone, the Israelites seemed to have betrayed their God by making a golden calf to worship. In response, Moses breaks the tablets; clearly, the Israelites are not ready to receive the word of God.

What should Moses have done when he found out what had occurred? Rashi quotes a Midrash that says Moses breaks the Tablets because he says to himself, “Receiving and eating from the Passover sacrifice, which is only one mitzvah in the Torah, is limited to those who are pure, here, when the Torah is like a bride,” so how can she be received by these sinners!?

What seems clear is that the tablets couldn’t be given to the Israelites just yet. However, Moses had other options. For example, he could have kept the Tablets for himself and the wise men on the mountain. God offers him a chance to forget about the people of Israel; God will start a new world with Moses. But Moses chooses to come down from the mountain and endure with his people. His message to his Israelite brethren is this: Even The Word of God, carved perfectly on stones from the top of Mount Sinai itself, is not an imitation for the real God!

Breaking the Tablets reflects Moses’s heartbreak and the disappointment of God. A Midrash says that God condoned Moses’s act. The lashes of freedom are no more hurtful than those of slavery, slavery to idols.

Freedom, as we learn on Passover, is also being together. Isolation is like being jailed. Moses decides to leave the Tablets behind and join his people. He proves the Mishpatim shebe’al peh, the oral Torah — that it’s not about revering the engraved words or images, it’s the reverent way we handle those words in every generation, and with all generations together.

There are times in life when we have to lift our eyes from the book and see life itself — life that we can’t control and in which we can’t accomplish everything. Therefore, we constantly have to make choices. Sometimes we have to make the choice to “break the tablets.”     When I imagine the sound of breaking the Tablets, I hear an awful sound that goes beyond the limits of its noise. I hear Moses’s heartbreak. I hear the sound of the breaking of the matza. This year, as we break the matza, let’s also hear another sound that Moses wanted us to hear — the sound of not having to worship an engraved word. The sound of the broken tablets that is the sound of freedom.

A happy and free Passover to all.

—Rabbi Gadi Capela