Moses stood on Mount Sinai wrapped in cloud for six days before God spoke a single word to him. Why the silence? Rabbi Jose the Galilean said it was purification — six days to burn away every trace of food and drink from his body until Moses became like the ministering angels themselves (Exodus 24:16). Rabbi Nathan disagreed: the silence was meant to frighten him, so that when the Torah finally came, Moses would receive it "with awe and fear, with dread and trembling" (Psalms 2:11).
The Torah passed through a chain of hands — Moses to Joshua, Joshua to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, the Prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. Those sages left three instructions for all future generations: be deliberate in judgment, raise up many disciples, and make a fence around the Torah.
A fence around the Torah. The idea sounds protective. But the very first person to try it caused the greatest catastrophe in human history.
God told Adam one thing: "Of the tree of knowledge you shall not eat, for on the day you eat of it you shall surely die" (Genesis 2:16-17). But Adam was not satisfied with God's exact words. He wanted to protect Eve even further, so he added a rule God never gave: "You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die" (Genesis 3:3).
The serpent saw his opening. He walked over to the tree and shook it with his hands and feet. The fruit fell to the ground. Nothing happened. He did not die. He turned to Eve and said: "See? Touching it did not kill me. It will not kill you either." And because Adam's added fence had fallen, Eve doubted the original commandment too. She ate.
The lesson burned itself into rabbinic memory for two thousand years: whoever adds too much to God's words will end up subtracting from them. A fence built too far from the thing it protects becomes the very gap the serpent walks through.