A Thought on Parshas Naso

"...u'kasav...u'macha..." "...and he writes...then dissolves..." (5:23) From time to time we read a passage in the Torah which seems to present principles which appear to run contrary to other principles. The appearance of contradictory ideas is a challenge for us. It can become fertile ground for those who seek to fault find and flaw-find in the Divine Word chas v'shalom. The parsha of the Sotah is probably a case in point. Throughout the Torah, so much emphasis in placed on the sanctity of HaShem's name. We must not desecrate it, we must not defile it and we certainly should not deface or erase it. Many verses throughout the Torah emphasize our charge to promote and to preserve kedusha. The Sotah ritual or ordeal seems like an exception to this high standard. The Torah requires that a scribe write out verses that are then obliterated. There are many homiletic lessons which our Sages derive from this, yet the question remains: how are we to comprehend the seeming inconsistency between the standard of maintaining the sanctity of the Name and this glaring 'exception'? ibn Shu'aib provides the insight that we have been waiting for. We have first another difficulty to deal with: our tradition relates that at Sinai, when HaShem spoke the words of Torah - the first two of the "Ten Commandments" - the first and the second clauses were actually uttered as a single statement. We understood what was being said yet it was said as a compressed single utterance containing multiple messages, in a manner that the human ear does not readily comprehend. At an almost angelic level, transcendently, we heard the entire Torah within that single solitary tone. Forever after, in all subsequent moments in time, we could not have comprehended anything from that tone. We are only able to hear the commandments one at a time, just as we can only fathom one bit of information at a time. How so much information, so many details, so vast a sea of Torah, could be condensed into such a single audible sound is beyond the human brain's grasp, just as "seeing thunder and hearing lightening" is beyond our intellectual frame. Nonetheless, everything did synthesize simultaneously into the Sound of Sinai, and we not only heard it, but we understood all of it at once in that one moment in history. This is alluded to in Tehillim 62:12 where we proclaim, "achas diber Elokim, shta'yim zu sho'mati - HaShem said one word yet I heard many." What are we meant to learn from that celestial reality, manifest within our mind but once in the history of the universe? Says ibn Shu'aib: that one-time phenomenon was to teach us that there are no contradictions in HaShem's Torah. Everything coincides. From our perspective, there are plenty of inconsistencies which we experience as contradictions. From a mortal view, we cannot grasp the dichotomies which our logic exposes, yet in the mind's theology, our questions only reflect our limitations, rather than sully HaShem's limitlessness. Thus, we look at the Name of HaShem which is written then obliterated. While defying what our limited logic would expect, we embrace the higher reality that when these rules were first spoken, our ears heard them all at once and every nuance fit in perfectly as a Divine whole. Good Shabbos. D Fox