Six Hundred Thirteen Commands Landed on Every Limb at Sinai

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The Maidservant Who Checked at Every Jar

The maidservant of Rabban Gamliel spent a day carrying the household's pure vessels from one house to another. Jars and vessels, one load after another, all of them holy and all of them ruined by a single touch from a woman who had become impure without noticing.

Between every jar she stopped and examined herself.

At the last one she examined herself and found that she had.

Rabban Gamliel went white when he heard. Everything in the house, he thought. Every jar he had watched her carry all afternoon.

He called her in. "Were you not examining yourself?"

"By your life, my lord, I examined myself at every single jar. It was only at this last one that I found it."

"Had this woman been lazy," he said, "every pure thing in this house would be unclean right now."

Slack hands, and the roof beams sink. Hands hanging down, and the house drips.

Hands That Went Slack at Rephidim

The same two words turn all the way around a few weeks later, on the road.

Israel pulled up their camp from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai. The place got its name from what happened to their hands there. They let them go slack, and what fell out of them was sin.

Slack hands, and the roof came down: God came down on Mount Sinai, onto the top of the mountain. Hands hanging low, and the house dripped: the earth shook, the heavens dripped, the clouds poured water.

One house nearly lost every jar in it. One nation stood under a sky that opened. The difference was what the hands had put down.

Six Commands Folded Into a Sentence About Fruit

Rabbi Judah son of Simon began with a line in praise of a woman. Many daughters have done well, and you have gone past all of them.

Adam walked out of the garden carrying six laws, and all six were packed inside one sentence God had spoken to him about eating from the trees. The opening verb held idolatry. The Name held blasphemy. The word for God held the courts and the judges. Over the man held bloodshed. Saying held the forbidden unions. From every tree of the garden held theft.

Noah was given a seventh after the flood: no limb torn off a living animal. Abraham was given circumcision. Isaac was the first to be given it on the eighth day. Jacob came away from the ford with a limp and the sinew of the thigh. Judah was given the duty of a man to his dead brother's widow.

Each of them held one splinter and handed it on. Then six hundred and thirteen landed on one people in one morning.

Every Limb Asked for a Commandment

Two hundred and forty-eight of them are things to do, and a person has two hundred and forty-eight limbs, and each limb says to the man it belongs to: please, do this one through me.

Three hundred and sixty-five of them are things not to do, and the sun's year has three hundred and sixty-five days, and each day says to the man walking through it: please, do not commit this one on me.

So a man wakes up already being asked, from inside his own body and from the calendar over his head.

They said the ball of Adam's heel used to dim the disk of the sun, and if that was the heel, nobody wanted to guess about his face. A man who makes two platters, one for himself and one for a servant, makes his own the beautiful one. Adam was made for the use of the Holy One. The sun was made for the use of everybody else.

Three More Waiting at the Border

Rabbi Judah son of Ilai, handed down through Rabbi Azariah and Rabbi Judah son of Simon, counted three more that were waiting at the edge of the land and could not be given anywhere else. Appoint a king. Build the Chosen House. Blot out the memory of Amalek.

None of the three works in a desert. A king needs a country, a sanctuary needs a place to stand, and Amalek was already there.

And God said to Israel: my children, read this passage out loud every year, and I will credit it to you as though you were standing in front of Mount Sinai taking the Torah again.

When. In the third month after they came out of Egypt.