In this week's parshah we encounter the declaration of נעשה ונשמע, "we will do and we will hear." The Talmud in Shabbat 88a records:
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 said "we will do" before "we will hear," a heavenly voice went forth and said to them: "Who revealed to my children this secret that the ministering angels use?"
This represents the pinnacle of willing acceptance - Israel so enthusiastically embracing the Torah that they speak in the language of angels themselves. But what is this "secret of the angels"? What does it mean that their mode is action preceding understanding? We'll return to this question.
Just a few lines earlier, the Gemara presents something quite different:
״וַיִּתְיַצְּבוּ בְּתַחְתִּית הָהָר״, אָמַר רַב אַבְדִּימִי בַּר חָמָא בַּר חַסָּא: מְלַמֵּד שֶׁכָּפָה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא עֲלֵיהֶם אֶת הָהָר כְּגִיגִית, וְאָמַר לָהֶם: אִם אַתֶּם מְקַבְּלִים הַתּוֹרָה מוּטָב, וְאִם לָאו — שָׁם תְּהֵא קְבוּרַתְכֶם.
Rav Avdimi bar Chama bar Chasa said: This teaches that the Holy One blessed be He held the mountain over them like a barrel and said to them: If you accept the Torah, good. If not, here will be your burial.
Tosafot asks the obvious question: If they had already declared נעשה ונשמע with such enthusiasm that God Himself praised them for speaking in angelic language, why was it necessary to hold the mountain over them?
There's a third element in this same passage. The Gemara records the conflict between Moses and the angels when he ascended to receive the Torah:
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?
The ministering angels objected: "Sovereign of the Universe! What is one born of woman doing among us?" God answered: "He has come to receive the Torah." They protested: "That secret treasure which has been hidden by You for 974 generations before the world was created - You desire to give it to flesh and blood?"
Moses's response cut to the heart of the matter. He went through the commandments systematically: "Did you go down to Egypt? Were you enslaved to Pharaoh? Why then should the Torah be yours?" He continued through each commandment - idolatry, Sabbath, honoring parents, murder, adultery, theft. "Is there jealousy among you? Is the evil inclination among you?" The angels immediately conceded.
Moses's argument was that Torah, as a system of specific commandments addressing concrete human struggles, belongs to humans who actually face these challenges. But this raises a question we'll understand better when we grasp the distinction between letter-Torah and word-Torah: What Torah did the angels want for themselves? What form of Torah could be relevant to beings without slavery, without work, without families, without the evil inclination?
The Nature of Coercion
Tosafot's question can be resolved by reconsidering what the "coercion" actually was. There was no literal mountain tipped over them as a physical threat. Rather, כפה עליהם הר כגיגית describes the overwhelming weight of divine beneficence itself - the exodus from slavery, the wealth bestowed upon them, the splitting of the sea, the daily manna falling from heaven. When someone has saved your life, fed you with daily wonders, split seas before you, enriched you beyond measure, the psychological pressure to accept their terms becomes nearly irresistible.
This resolves Tosafot's question. There's no contradiction between נעשה ונשמע and the coercion of the mountain. The overwhelming love was precisely what produced their enthusiastic acceptance. Both narratives describe the same reality: genuine enthusiasm born from a position where refusal was psychologically impossible. The beneficence was the coercion.
But there's something deeper in this tension between their willing acceptance and divine coercion, between the angelic language they spoke and the mountain held over them. To understand it, we need to examine the structure and function of angels versus those of humans.
The Ontology of Angels
We encounter several distinctive features of angelic existence throughout our sources. When Jacob wrestles with the angel and asks his name, the response is: למה זה תשאל לשמי - "Why do you ask my name?" (Genesis 32:30). Similarly, when Manoach asks the angel for his name: למה זה תשאל לשמי והוא פלאי - "Why do you ask my name, and it is hidden?" (Judges 13:18). Angels ordinarily don't have unique, fixed names. They're not defined by persistent being but morph and change according to their mission. They're pure function, emissaries - the very word מלאך means messenger. A person's given name comprises specific fixed letters that define his very being, his essence, the particular formulation of his soul. But angels exist more fluidly.
In Yechezkel's vision of the heavenly chariot: ורגליהם רגל ישרה וכף רגליהם ככף רגל עגל - "and their legs were a straight leg, and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf's foot" (Ezekiel 1:7). The Yerushalmi in Berachot (1:1) addresses both halves of this verse. Regarding רגל ישרה, the straight leg: this means they have one leg, not two. Regarding כף רגליהם ככף רגל עגל: המלאכים אין להן קפיצין - angels have no joints, no capacity for jumping.
Isaiah describes the seraphim surrounding the divine throne: שרפים עומדים ממעל לו - "seraphim standing above him" (Isaiah 6:2). Angels are called עומדים, standing ones. Humans, by contrast, are מהלכים, walkers. As Zechariah records God's promise to Joshua the High Priest: ונתתי לך מהלכים בין העומדים האלה - "I will give you walkers among these standing ones" (Zechariah 3:7). The commentaries quote Targum Yonatan: you will be a walker among the angels who are standing.
According to Kabbalistic tradition, angels reside in עולם היצירה, the world of Formation, while humans exist in עולם העשייה, the world of Action.
What connects these features - the lack of names, the single straight leg, the absence of joints, the designation as "standing" rather than "walking," the residence in Formation rather than Action?
Letters and Words: Potential and Actualization
The Zohar explains that when God created the world, He looked at the Torah and used it as the blueprint for all of creation. The entire existence of creation is comprised of combinations, permutations, and formulations of the letters of the Torah. Like a digital world made up of bits and bytes, or how DNA comprises combinations and permutations of just four nucleotides, creation itself emerges from the letters of Torah.
Letters have unlimited creative potential. With knowledge of the alphabet alone, you can join letters into words, formulate sentences, structure paragraphs, create enduring works. But letters in themselves are pure potential - they can become anything. Only once specific letters are selected - only this character and not another, only this number of repetitions, only this precise order and position - only then does the word become fixed with a specific definition and meaning.
This distinction between letters and words maps onto the distinction between potential and actualization. Letters represent everything in potentia - the raw building blocks that could be formed into any combination. The letters of a person's name contain his essence, the particular soul formulation that makes him who he is. Letters are the alphabet of being itself - pure potential that becomes actualized through specific arrangement.
The world of Yetzirah, Formation, is this realm - a step before actualization, where being exists as potential waiting to be formed. The world of Asiya, Action, is where creation becomes fixed and actualized into specific forms.
This is the essence of angelic existence. Angels are less actualized beings. They reside in the world of Formation, in the realm of potential. They possess the capacity to be anything - whatever their mission requires. Like letters that can be selected and arranged into any word as needed, angels morph from one function to another. When Jacob asks "What is your name?" the angel's response is ontologically precise: "Why do you ask my name?" There's no persistent name because there's no persistent self. This particular manifestation, this current arrangement of angelic potential into a specific mission, will cease when the task is complete. The angel will become whatever the next divine directive requires.
Here's a paradox: when one is anything, one is also nothing. Angels' infinite flexibility - their capacity to be formed into any mission, to serve any function - is precisely their infinite fixity. Because there's no self separate from the current mission, no persistent identity that carries from task to task, there's nothing to transform. Transformation requires a subject that persists through change. Angels, as pure potential without persistent actualized selfhood, cannot develop, cannot grow, cannot change their essential nature. The flexibility is in itself the stasis.
This explains the single leg. Two legs represent branching paths, options, different directions one might take. The prophet Elijah challenged Israel: עד מתי אתם פוסחים על שתי הסעיפים - "How long will you waver between two opinions?" The Hebrew literally means "limping on two branches" - standing at a fork, capable of going either direction. Angels have רגל ישרה, one straight leg. They have perfect alignment - mission and essence are identical. There's no internal conflict, no choice between paths, no deliberation. They're deterministic beings by nature.
The lack of joints - כף רגליהם ככף רגל עגל, feet like a calf's foot, המלאכים אין להן קפיצין - reveals another dimension. Joints allow for jumping, for movement between levels. A human being can rise from one spiritual station to another, can descend and then ascend again. The capacity for קפיצה, jumping between ontological levels, is what distinguishes the walker from the one who stands. Angels can't jump between levels. Like animals, whose nature is fixed and who can't rise intellectually or spiritually beyond their biological programming, angels are fixed in their station. They're עומדים - standing, static in their being. Humans are מהלכים - walkers with the capacity for developmental transformation.
Angels can have effects in the world of Action - they appear to Abraham, they wrestle with Jacob, they announce to Manoach. But they don't exist in Asiya ontologically. Their being remains in Yetzirah, in Formation, in potential, even when their effects manifest in the actualized world.
Determinism Made Ontological
The angelic traits we've described - no persistent name, single leg, no joints, standing rather than walking - aren't arbitrary details. They describe a single unified mode of existence: pure function without persistent self. And pure function without persistent self is determinism made ontological. An angel doesn't choose its mission because there's no "it" separate from the mission to do the choosing. The mission and the messenger are identical. There's no deliberation, no weighing of options, no internal struggle between competing desires. There's only the execution of divine will - perfect, immediate, inevitable. This is what it means to be deterministic: to have one's actions follow necessarily from one's nature, with no gap between what one is and what one does, no space for the "could have done otherwise" that defines choice.
What Torah Did the Angels Want?
Now we can understand the conflict between Moses and the angels at a deeper level. What form of Torah could angels possibly desire? The Ramban provides the answer. He writes in his introduction to the Torah:
It would appear that the Torah "written with letters of black fire upon a background of white fire" was in this form we have mentioned, namely, that the writing was contiguous, without break of words, which made it possible for it to be read by way of Divine Names and also by way of our normal reading which makes explicit the Torah and the commandment. It was given to Moses our teacher using the division of words which expresses the commandment, and orally it was transmitted to him in the rendition which consists of the Divine Names.
According to Ramban, the Torah existed in letter form with the ability to be read and formulated in myriad ways - including as divine names, the most elevated reading of all. Moses received from God a fully formed Torah, one that was less potential and more actualized, with formed words and sentences applicable specifically to human beings.
This is what the angels wanted. Angels, beings of pure potential like letters themselves, desired the Torah in its undifferentiated form - as contiguous letters readable as divine names. This letter-Torah would match their ontological state. Infinite potential, infinitely adaptable, capable of being read in countless ways, never fixed into a single meaning.
But God desired to give word-Torah to humans. Differentiated commandments. Specific mitzvot with defined parameters. "Do not murder. Do not steal. Honor your father and mother." This is why Moses's response was so devastating to the angels' claim. The commandments he listed weren't just pointing out practical differences. He was revealing something essential: word-Torah requires actualized beings to receive it.
"Did you go down to Egypt?" Slavery is an actualized historical experience, not a potential state. "Is there an evil inclination among you?" The yetzer hara is the struggle of an actualized being with competing desires and the capacity to choose between them. "Do you have fathers and mothers?" Family relationships exist between distinct, persistent individuals with ongoing connections.
Every commandment Moses cited requires something the angels lack: actualized selfhood capable of transformation. You can't command a being of pure potential to honor parents it doesn't have, to rest from work it doesn't perform, to resist temptations it doesn't experience. Commandments presuppose an actualized subject who can choose to obey or transgress, who can rise above current state or fall below it.
God desires transformation of actualized beings. This is the entire purpose. An angel executing its mission perfectly isn't transformation - it's simply potential manifesting according to divine will, like letters forming into the word they were always going to form. But a human being, already actualized into a particular nature with particular inclinations and limitations, choosing to transcend that nature, to elevate despite the pull downward, to develop from one spiritual level to another - this is the work that God desires. This is why Torah must be given as formed words to formed beings, not as potential letters to beings of potential.
The Paradox Within Humans
But this neat division between angels as deterministic beings and humans with full agency is itself problematic. We've described angels as beings without free will, pure function without choice, deterministic by nature. And we've described humans as actualized beings capable of transformation through free choice. But this creates too clean a separation.
The Rambam addresses the paradox at the intersection of divine foreknowledge and human free will. In Hilchot Teshuvah (5:5), he acknowledges the question directly: If God knows in advance what choices each person will make, how can those choices be truly free? And if the choices are genuinely free, how can God's knowledge be complete and certain?
The Rambam's answer is striking in its humility: "The knowledge of the Creator is not like the knowledge of created beings... Just as it is not in the power of human beings to comprehend and grasp the truth of the Creator... so it is not in the power of human beings to comprehend and grasp the knowledge of the Creator."
This isn't a philosophical resolution. It's an acknowledgment that the paradox is incomprehensible to the human mind. We can't understand how both can be true simultaneously - divine foreknowledge and human freedom - yet both are axiomatic to Jewish theology. God's knowledge is complete and certain. Human beings have genuine free will. These aren't compatible within our framework of understanding, yet both are true.
Modern neuroscience has added another dimension to this ancient paradox. The notion of determinism in human actions - that our choices emerge from prior causes, whether genetic, neurological, environmental, or some combination - has broad scientific support. Experiments showing that brain activity associated with a decision begins before conscious awareness of making that choice, studies demonstrating how much of human behavior can be predicted from brain states and environmental factors, the recognition that "free will" as traditionally conceived may be incompatible with what we know about causation - all of this lends support to a deterministic understanding of human action.
Yet the lived human experience, the phenomenology of choice, the entire structure of law and morality and meaning - all of this presupposes agency. We experience ourselves as choosing. We hold ourselves and others responsible for choices made. The very concept of ought implies can - moral obligation makes no sense without the freedom to comply or refuse.
Thus human agency in choosing right from wrong, in rising toward good or falling toward evil, exists in some unfathomable gap within this paradoxical space. It's not that we've resolved the paradox by finding some elegant compatibility between determination and freedom. It's that we operate within a tension we can't intellectually resolve, working in the space between two truths that seem mutually exclusive yet are both somehow real.
Both Modes at Sinai
With this understanding, we return to Tosafot's question with new depth. Why was coercion necessary when Israel had already demonstrated willful acceptance?
Because both elements - coercion and acceptance, determinism and free will - must be present at the founding moment of Torah. The entire premise of Torah depends on this paradox. The commandments, reward and punishment, the giving of Torah in actualized form to humans rather than angels - all of this functions in the nebulous space between free will and determinism. Both modes are somehow paradoxically present, woven into the fabric of the covenant itself.
The Paradox Within Acceptance
But there's something even deeper here, something that strikes at the very heart of our understanding of that moment at Sinai.
Even the declaration of נעשה ונשמע itself - the very utterance that seems to represent the pinnacle of human voluntary acceptance - contains the deterministic element within its formulation. This is why it's called the "secret of the angels," the language that the ministering angels use.
To say "we will do" before "we will hear" is to commit to action before deliberation. It is to accept the outcome before understanding what it entails. It is to pledge obedience without weighing whether to consent. This is precisely the mode of angels - beings who have no choice, who execute divine will without internal debate, who perform their missions not because they deliberated and decided but because they are pure function. עושי דברו לשמוע בקול דברו - "they perform His word, and then they hear His voice" (Psalms 103:20). Action precedes understanding because there's no genuine choosing, no gap between hearing the command and executing it, no moment where "I could refuse" exists as a real possibility.
When Israel declares נעשה ונשמע, they speak in the language of deterministic beings. They adopt the mode of those who have no free will. The mode of acceptance itself contains the deterministic element - not despite their willingness, but within the very structure of their willing.
This is the deepest level of the paradox. It's not merely that both coercion and acceptance were present at Sinai, standing alongside each other. It's that the acceptance itself was formulated in deterministic language. The moment that should represent pure human agency, pure free choice, pure voluntary commitment - this very moment is expressed in the terminology of beings without choice.
Both modes woven into each other, inseparable. You can't extract the deterministic element from the acceptance without destroying the acceptance itself. You can't preserve the free will without acknowledging that it speaks in the language of necessity. The paradox goes all the way down to the root of the covenant.
The Golden Calf and the Covering
Isaiah 6:2 describes the seraphim surrounding the divine throne:
שְׂרָפִים עֹמְדִים מִמַּעַל לוֹ שֵׁשׁ כְּנָפַיִם שֵׁשׁ כְּנָפַיִם לְאֶחָד בִּשְׁתַּיִם יְכַסֶּה פָנָיו וּבִשְׁתַּיִם יְכַסֶּה רַגְלָיו וּבִשְׁתַּיִם יְעוֹפֵף
Seraphim stood above Him, each one had six wings: with two he covered his face, with two he covered his legs, and with two he flew.
Rashi, quoting the Midrash Tanchuma, explains the reason for covering the legs:
ובשתים יכסה רגליו - לצניעות שלא יראה כל גופו לפני בוראו. ובתנחומא ראיתי כסוי הרגלים לפי שהם ככף רגל עגל, שלא להזכיר לישראל עון העגל
"With two he covered his legs - for modesty, so that his entire body should not be seen before his Creator. And in Tanchuma I saw regarding the covering of the legs: because they are like the foot of a calf, so as not to remind Israel of the sin of the calf." (Parshat Emor 11)
The covering is explicitly connected to the golden calf. But what's the actual connection between an angel's leg and the golden calf? It's inconceivable that we're referring to physical resemblance, since angels are spiritual beings without material bodies. We've already explained that the calf-like leg of angels - the straight leg without joints - refers to their lack of developmental capacity, their inability to rise between levels because they're deterministic beings, just like animals are deterministic beings without higher agency. But how does this ontological characteristic connect to the historical sin of the golden calf?
The answer comes from the parah adumah, the red heifer. Rashi himself provides the proof in two separate places. In his commentary on Exodus 15:25, he states that the mitzvah of parah adumah was among the commandments given at Marah - chronologically before the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, and certainly before the golden calf incident recorded in Exodus 32. Yet in his commentary on Numbers 19:22, Rashi quotes the famous teaching that the red heifer atones for the golden calf: "Let the mother come and clean up the mess of her child."
The cure was commanded before the disease existed. This temporal paradox proves that the golden calf was predetermined. God gave the remedy chronologically before the sin occurred, because the sin was already determined in the divine plan. This is alluded to in Panim Yafot on Parshat Chukat, who explains that this is the deepest understanding of the chok, the inexplicable decree, of parah adumah. The unknowable, paradoxical nature of the red heifer - that it purifies the impure yet renders the pure impure, that it defies rational explanation even for King Solomon - is precisely because it embodies the unresolvable paradox between determinism and free will.
Now the connection crystallizes. The straight calf-leg of angels represents deterministic existence - no joints to jump between levels, no capacity for developmental transformation, fixed in station like animals are fixed by nature. The golden calf represents Israel operating in that same deterministic mode. Not merely that they sinned, but that they were in some sense bound to sin, that free will was suspended, that they lacked genuine agency in that moment. The sin emerged from a predetermined element woven into the fabric of reality, as proven by the cure existing before the disease.
Forgiveness of the golden calf required invoking this deterministic understanding. If Israel had possessed complete free will in that moment, if they could have chosen otherwise with no constraints, then the sin becomes unforgivable - pure guilt with no mitigation. Mercy becomes possible only when we acknowledge the deterministic element: they were destined to fail, human nature made the fall inevitable, divine foreknowledge meant the sin was already part of reality before it occurred.
Both the angel's calf-leg and the golden calf point to the same ontological reality: deterministic existence without the capacity for transformation.
So when angels cover their calf-like legs, they're not concealing a physical resemblance. They're concealing the deterministic mode itself. But why must this mode be hidden?
If the deterministic truth of the golden calf were left exposed - if Israel could see clearly that their sin was predetermined, that the parah adumah existed before their failure because their failure was already fixed in the divine plan - they would see themselves reflected in that calf-leg. They would understand: our sin was inevitable, our failure was predetermined, our repentance is meaningless. We're like animals, like angels, deterministic beings without genuine agency. The entire covenant depends on our capacity for transformation, on our being מהלכים who can rise from our failures. But if the failure was predetermined, then the rising is illusion. We're עומדים after all, fixed in our station, incapable of genuine change.
The covenant can't survive this knowledge. The very premise that made us worthy of receiving Torah - our actualized selfhood capable of choosing and transforming - collapses if we see ourselves as deterministic. The covering is therefore an act of divine grace. It hides the deterministic framework so that we can continue to experience ourselves as agents, to work toward transformation as if it were genuinely possible, to repent as if our choices truly matter. Even as we know, in some inaccessible part of our understanding, that the paradox remains - that both truths are somehow real, that we operate in the unfathomable gap between them.
Conclusion: The Necessary Covering
This deterministic element in the great sin of the golden calf is both our salvation and our bane. It's our salvation because it makes forgiveness possible. If humans are destined to sin - whether by divine foreknowledge or simply by the inevitable fallibility of human nature - then we can't be held to maximal responsibility. Mercy becomes coherent. Atonement becomes possible. The parah adumah can purify because the sin wasn't entirely of our own making.
But it's also our bane. Having our deterministic nature in focus takes away all meaning from Torah and mitzvot. If we're truly predetermined, if we lack genuine agency, then we're rendered like angels - or worse, like animals. Pure function without choice, fixed nature without the capacity for transformation. Why would we merit receiving the Torah if we don't exhibit the essential quality that distinguished us from angels - the capacity for free will, for rising above our fixity, for genuine transformation through choice?
Moses's entire argument to the angels depended on this distinction. We have slavery and temptation and family and the evil inclination - actualized challenges requiring actualized choices. We can rise and fall, transform and develop, walk between levels rather than stand fixed in place. This is why word-Torah belongs to us rather than letter-Torah to them. But if the golden calf proves we're also deterministic, that we too lack genuine agency, then the entire foundation crumbles. We would be unworthy of the Torah we received.
Perhaps this is the deepest meaning of the angels covering their legs. The calf-like legs of angels - symbolizing deterministic beings without joints, without the capacity to jump between levels - bring to mind the deterministic nature of the sin of the golden calf. And this deterministic perspective eviscerates all meaning and special status of humans. It reduces us to beings unworthy of Torah, incapable of the transformation that is the entire purpose of the commandments.
To be able to continue with Torah and what it represents to us, the deterministic mode must be covered. Not eliminated - it remains real, it was necessary for forgiveness, it's part of the incomprehensible paradox. But it must be concealed, hidden from view, so that we can operate in the mode of free will and agency. The covering doesn't resolve the paradox. Both modes remain true. But one must be hidden so the other can function, so that we can work within the unfathomable gap where human transformation and divine service become possible.
The paradox that was baked into Sinai - both coercion and acceptance, both deterministic language and genuine enthusiasm - continues through the golden calf and its forgiveness, proven by the temporal impossibility of the red heifer, and managed through the covering of the angels' legs. We operate within a tension we can't resolve, working in the space between determinism and freedom, serving God in the gap between what we must be and what we choose to become.
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