Israel Fought Too Much to Receive the Torah on Time

God had a schedule. The Torah was to be given immediately after the Exodus from Egypt. Israel would leave Pharaoh's house, cross the sea, and receive the law. The entire purpose of the liberation was the covenant, and the covenant had a date. Then Israel opened its mouth.

The tradition preserved in Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews records the specific reason for the delay: great discord reigned among the people at the beginning of their march through the desert. They argued. They complained. They nursed old resentments and new grudges. They could not travel a day without conflict. And God looked at this quarreling nation and said: I cannot give this to them now. The Torah's ways are ways of loveliness, and all its paths are paths of peace. A nation at war with itself cannot receive it.

The bickering delayed Sinai until the new moon of the third month, when Israel arrived at the mountain and, perhaps exhausted by their own arguing, fell quiet. Harmony was established. And only then did God say: now. Now I will give them the Torah. The most significant legal and spiritual document in Jewish history was postponed not by enemy armies or divine testing, but by the people's inability to get along with each other.

There is a striking secondary observation embedded in this teaching. The text notes that Israel had been sinful upon their arrival at Mount Sinai, continuing to tempt God and doubting His omnipotence. Then, after a short time, they changed in spirit. And barely had they reformed when God found them worthy of the Torah. The speed of the reversal matters. This is not a story of a long purification process. It is a story of a sudden turn. The tradition calls this the power of penance: the capacity of a changed heart to unlock what was previously withheld.

But the Midrash Rabbah, compiled in the land of Israel between the third and sixth centuries CE, adds something the Ginzberg account does not: a parable drawn from a fruit tree. Rabbi Azarya observed that the apple tree produces its blossom before its leaves, which is unusual, the flowers come before the protective covering. Israel, he said, was like that tree. They put performance before hearing. “We will do and we will hear,” they said at Sinai, committing to obedience before they knew what was being asked of them. The flowers before the leaves. The action before the understanding.

Rabbi Azarya made a second observation: the apple tree ripens only in Sivan. Israel, too, first emitted a good fragrance only in Sivan. Something was happening to the people over those fifty days between Egypt and Sinai. The fruit was growing, the fragrance developing. The discord of the early weeks was part of a larger ripening process that the people could not see from inside it. From the outside, it looked like fighting. From above, it looked like a fruit slowly coming to readiness.

Rabbi Azarya pushed further: from the time the apple tree produces its blossom until it produces ripened fruit is exactly fifty days. From the time Israel left Egypt until they received the Torah was exactly fifty days. This is not coincidence. The apple tree is a parable for the entire Exodus-to-Sinai arc. The leaving was the blossom. The arrival at the mountain in harmony was the fruit. Fifty days of transformation in between.

The traditions connect at a point that might otherwise be missed. The delay caused by bickering and the ripening symbolized by the apple tree are not two separate ideas. They are the same idea seen from different angles. From the inside, the delay looked like failure: Israel couldn't maintain peace, so God withheld the Torah. From the outside, from the perspective of the apple tree parable, the fifty days were always the length it was supposed to take. The blossom cannot become fruit overnight. The fighting and reforming and arriving at harmony were the stages of development, not the obstacles to it.

There is also a note about simplicity in the apple tree teaching. Rabbi Yehuda ben Rabbi Simon, drawing on the same passage in Midrash Rabbah, compared redemption to a cheap apple that nonetheless offers its fragrance again and again. Moses told Israel: you can be redeemed with a simple matter. The Passover lamb required only a bundle of hyssop. The hyssop was worth almost nothing. The plunder of Egypt, the sea, Sihon and Og, and thirty-one Canaanite kings followed from it. The simple action, performed faithfully, unlocked the vast reward. The apple is cheap. The fragrance is real.

Israel arrived at Sinai in silence, in peace, after fifty days that had broken them and reformed them. God looked at them and gave the Torah. The fragrance was finally right. The blossom had become fruit, and the fruit was ready to receive what had been prepared for it from before the world began.