In one of the most poignant moments in Torah, the newly formed Jewish people responds as one voice when presented with a tremendous opportunity and challenge.
“Moshe wrote down all the things God said. Then he took sefer habrit (the book of the covenant) and read it aloud to all the people. They said, “All that God says—na’ase venishma! (We will do and we will understand.)”
It’s not easy for people at any stage of life to go into an experience where we know our deficiencies and what we don’t know, but we go into the new task with great excitement anyway. That’s exactly what Bnai Yisrael does here. This newly minted Jewish people hears Torah for the very first time, and they UNANIMOUSLY answered that they were prepared to take on a new task and that they were willing to learn the systems, language, and wisdom from it as they went along.
Some questions you might ask your child(ren) about this at home as you’re talking about it:
- If you were the one making the rules, is it better to understand the rules first or just do them first?
- What kinds of things do you understand better after you do them?
- Why might it help to do something as a way to understand it?
- What rules do we have in our family that you don’t understand?