When God tricked Moses

There is a medrash about this week's parshah that I found very strange.

Hashem is afraid that the Jewish people gathered at Sinai will mistakenly think that it was Moshe's voice they heard from the mountaintop. And so, Hashem resorts to a ruse to get Moshe off the mountain; he tells Moshe to warn the people not to scale the flank of the mountain from any side, at which point, Moshe responds that he has already told the people as much as per God's instruction. Then, Moshe failing to get the hint, is told by Hashem to ensure that the people have purified themselves, and separated themselves from their spouses. Moshe summarily goes down, fulfilling Hashem's bidding – and then, with Moshe already at the base of the mountain, Hashem catches him off-guard, pronouncing the first two commandments Himself (without Moshe at his side) so as to disabuse the Jewish people of the notion that it was any other than He Himself who had given over the commandments.

Usually, to the best of my understanding, the medrash comes to shed light on a complexity in the text itself, not to make an exact recording of the events that transpired but rather, to present them in a more illustrative way so that we, the readers of the Bible, can better grasp the import of what actually happened.

What, then, are the sages trying to communicate here? Surely Hashem didn't feel His authority, or singularity as the giver of Jewish law was being impinged upon by Moshe's presence. And, likewise, Moshe most certainly didn't feel that he, as opposed to Hashem, should be perceived as the giver of Jewish law. The humblest of all men, Moshe, in no shape or form, could have siphoned off in any form from the grandeur of the moment at hand.

Rabbi Sacks Z"L in his book, "I believe," wrote a novel thought. Christianity, he writes, needed to connect between man and God and so it made man into a God. It would seem that the interplay here has a resonance that sheds light on the dialectic between the heavenly and earthly domain.

The tractate of Sukkah has a fascinating discussion about the height of the aron ha'brit, the holy tabernacle, from which we learn the minimal height of a sukkah. A sukkah has to be at minimum, 10 handbreadths in height, because God's presence doesn't rest beneath a height of 10 handbreadths; the Talmud volleys back and forth but fails to find an instance in which Hashem's presence indeed came to rest beneath that distance from the ground.

In essence, it would seem that Hashem is telling Moshe Rabbeinu – and the Jewish people – that for the Torah to be given it needs to be given in a way that is not adulterated in any form by the slightest trace of human involvement. As the verse in Tehillim (115:16) states (a verse quoted as a prooftext in Sukkah), "The heavens are for Hashem above, and the Earth has been bestowed to mankind."

Thus, it was absolutely necessary for Moshe Rabbeinu to be together with Hashem on the mountaintop, and to be summarily sent down; otherwise, the message could not have been conveyed that God and man were two distinctly separate entities. It, in this light, wasn't a matter of ruse, but rather intentional desire for man to know that he cannot coexist in the same space or realm, when Hashem is appearing in the form of the giver of the Torah.

Moshe is hence sent down, clearly, in a totally different domain from God almighty. That clear delineation is made, and in keeping with the Kuzari, by Rabbi Judah Halevi, God's revelation at Sinai has fortified in the minds of the Jewish people that Hashem was the sole giver of the Torah; the Kuzari writes that the only reason we, as the Jewish people, are obligated to keep the Torah is because we – our ancestors, an embodiment of us – were present at Sinai. Were Moshe Rabbeinu to have had any involvement in the giving of the Torah, were he to even be in the same vicinity, that message would not have been adequately conveyed, a message that makes a stark contradistinction between Jewish and Christian belief.