Ink and Stone

The Torah comes in two forms: written and engraved.

On the last day of his life, Moses inscribed the Torah on parchment scrolls. But this written Torah was preceded by an engraved Torah: forty years earlier, at Mount Sinai, the Divine law was given to us in the form of Ten Commandments etched by the hand of G-d in two tablets of stone.

When something is written, the substance of the letters that express it--the ink--remains a separate entity from the substance upon which they have been set--the parchment. On the other hand, letters engraved in stone are forged in it: the words are stone and the stone is words.

By the same token, there is an aspect of Torah that is "inked" on our soul: we understand it, our emotions are roused by it; it becomes our "lifestyle" or even our "personality"; but it remains something additional to ourselves. Yet there is a dimension of Torah that is engraved in our being. There is a dimension of Torah which expresses a bond with G-d that is of the very essence of the Jewish soul.