בס׳ד

"Where does it say that you have a contract with G-d to have an easy life?"

the Lubavitcher Rebbe



"Failure is not the enemy of success; it is its prerequisite."

Rabbi Nosson Scherman



22 Aug 2013

The whole tablets and the broken tablets

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma and the national ACLU have filed suit on behalf of several Oklahomans challenging the constitutionality of the state’s Ten Commandments Monument.
http://acluok.org/2013/08/aclu-of-oklahoma-challenges-state-capitol-ten-commandments-monument/

If one reads through the complaint, one will receive a bible lesson about Moses and the Ten Commandments. Below is an excerpt taken from the complaint which can be read in its entitrety over here.











On page 6, the complaint states, "...the first set being smashed in anger over the peoples' corruption in worshiping an idol in Moses's absence, and the second set being placed in the Ark of the Covenant."

I would like to make a few suggestions regarding the wording. Firstly, I believe peoples' should be corrected to people's. Additionally, Rabbi YY Jacobson discusses Moses's smashing of the tablets in a very interesting essay titled Why Breaking the Tablets Was Moses' Greatest Accomplishment.  
 
2. The rabbis teach us that "The whole tablets and the broken tablets nestled inside the Ark of the Covenant (1)." The Jews proceeded to gather the broken fragments of the first set of tablets and had them stored in the Ark, in the Tabernacle, together with the second whole tablets. Both sets of tablets were later taken into the Land of Israel and kept side by side in the Ark, situated in the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem. 
1) Talmud Bava Basra 14a.
http://theyeshiva.net/Article/View/87/Broken

Those who read Talmud Bava Bassra 14a will come upon the following sentence:

This intimates that the fragments of the tables  were [also] deposited in the ark.

One might amend the complaint to read  "the first set being smashed in anger over the people's corruption in worshiping an idol in Moses's absence, and the second set being placed in the Ark of the Covenant, alongside the broken tablets."

When the monument was first installed, people were upset with two spelling errors which have since been corrected.


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