Q&A: Breaking the Tablets
Breaking the Tablets
Question
Maybe this is a well-known question, but… I was looking today at the breaking of the Tablets, among other things, and it says that Moses was told, “More power to you for breaking them.” So if breaking the Tablets was a good thing, then why do we fast over it? And if you say that we fast because it was necessary to break them because of the Golden Calf—in other words, “more power to you” only afterward, after the fact, but ideally of course it would have been better if we had never needed that breaking—then shouldn’t we say that we fast over the Calf and not over the breaking of the Tablets?
Answer
First, we do not actually fast because of the breaking of the Tablets. That is one of the five things that happened on that day, but the fast is for the breaching of the wall. Second, there is no problem at all with saying that we fast over the breaking of the Tablets even though it happened because of the Golden Calf. We fast over the fact that we reached a situation in which it was necessary to break the Tablets.