The Man Who Kept Every Commandment Including the Forgotten Ones

He makes a claim that sounds like arrogance but functions as grief. In Midrash Tehillim on Psalm 42, a voice speaks to God and points to the Israelites in Egypt: those people kept one commandment, the blood on the doorposts at Passover, and they were redeemed. But I, says this voice, have kept all the commandments I was given. Even the ones I forgot. Every one of them.

The rabbis preserve this voice without dismissing it as pride. They treat it as a cry, the cry of a person who has done everything right, by every possible measure, and still finds themselves in darkness. Not Egypt. But exile. The darkness that has no visible redemption at its door.

The Logic of the Comparison to Egypt

Midrash Tehillim, compiled from rabbinic teachings across several centuries of late antiquity, reads Psalm 42 as a composite of voices. The speaker who compares himself to the Egyptians is not making a historical observation. He is making a theological argument. If one commandment was enough to unlock redemption in Egypt, what is required of him, who has kept them all? What is God waiting for?

This is the structure of covenantal complaint: I have upheld my end. The speaker lists his credentials not to boast but to make the case for divine reciprocity. The 3,205 texts of the midrash-aggadah tradition return to this argument repeatedly. Abraham argued it. Moses argued it. The prophets argued it. The structure is always the same: here is what was asked of us, here is what we have done, here is the gap between what we have given and what has come back.

The detail that stops every reader, though, is not the counting of the commandments kept. It is the claim about the forgotten ones. Even those that I have forgotten, I do. This is not simply diligence. It is a claim about the orientation of a life: that the commitment to the divine will has become so complete, so constitutive of who this person is, that even in forgetting a specific commandment they have somehow, in some way, fulfilled it. The soul that is fully turned toward God does not need to remember every rule. The direction itself does the work.

Joseph in Egypt and the Commandments Before Sinai

The connection the midrash draws to Joseph is rooted in a broader rabbinic understanding: the patriarchs observed the Torah before it was given. The Legends of the Jews, Louis Ginzberg's compilation from sources spanning the second through twelfth centuries, describes Joseph in Potiphar's house studying the Torah that was not yet written, committing himself to laws that did not yet have names. He kept the Sabbath in Egypt. He kept the dietary restrictions. He maintained his separation from Potiphar's wife not only because of personal virtue but because he understood that certain boundaries are constitutive of what Israel is meant to be.

Joseph in Egypt, surrounded by a culture entirely unlike his father's household, managing to remain himself without a text to guide him, is the prototype of the voice in Psalm 42. How? By the orientation of the soul. By having turned so completely toward the divine that even in a foreign land, even without a written law, even in a house with a beautiful woman who pursued him daily, the direction held.

Elijah as the Figure Who Embodies Total Observance

The rabbis identified the voice in this passage of Midrash Tehillim with the prophetic tradition, and the figure who recurs most often in that identification is Elijah. Midrash Aggadah describes Elijah as a man who had achieved a level of observance so complete that he could not understand why the rest of Israel had not. This is what made him both great and limited: he saw the standard so clearly that he lost patience with everyone who fell short of it.

At Horeb, when God asks Elijah what he is doing there, Elijah's answer is precisely this: I have been very jealous for the Lord God of hosts, for the children of Israel have forsaken your covenant, thrown down your altars, and slain your prophets with the sword (1 Kings 19:10). The complaint is: I have kept everything. They have kept nothing. The comparison to the Israelites in Egypt who kept one commandment and were redeemed would have made perfect sense to Elijah. He had kept them all. He was alone in a cave. Where was the redemption?

Why God's Answer to Elijah Was Not Redemption

God's response to Elijah at Horeb is one of the most discussed passages in prophetic literature. God was not in the wind. Not in the earthquake. Not in the fire. God was in the still small voice, the thin sound of silence. And God's instruction to Elijah was not: wait, redemption is coming. It was: go back. Anoint Hazael king of Aram. Anoint Jehu king of Israel. Anoint Elisha as your successor. There is more work to do.

The Zohar, composed in thirteenth-century Castile, Spain, reads Elijah's cave experience as a kabbalistic lesson about the nature of divine speech: the thunder and fire are the outer garments of the divine presence, awe-inspiring but not the essence. The thin silence is where the actual communication happens. Elijah, who had called down fire from heaven and proven God's reality in the most dramatic terms imaginable, needed to learn to hear at a different register.

The voice in Midrash Tehillim who says he has kept even the forgotten commandments is, in this reading, still learning what Elijah learned at Horeb: that the counting of observances, however impressive, is not the same as the thin silence in which God actually speaks. The deer who longs for water in Psalm 42 is not only tallying what it deserves. It is thirsting. The thirst is the point, not the tally. And the soul that thirsts, even in the cave, even at the bottom of its complaint, is still oriented in the right direction.