“Why did Moshe have to smash the Tablets? If the Jews were undeserving of them, he could have hidden them or returned them to their maker? Why destroy this most sacred item?

The Rogatchover Gaon, Rabbi Yosef Rozen (1858-1936) offers a novel and brilliant approach. There are two ways to understand and experience Torah, as a wave or a particle. There is the approach that zooms in and one that zooms out. You can focus on the specifics of a law, or you can divest the law from its particular incarnation and reveal the underlying principles, which will bring out its relationship with many other laws. On yet a deeper level, you can see Torah as the sum of many parts, or you can see all of its parts as reflections of a singular unity.

This, says the Rogatchover, was the dramatic transformation between the first and second tablets. In a riveting analysis, we discover two approaches to understanding Judaism, to understanding the universe, and to viewing the fragments of our own lives.”