My Moroccan Jewish father-in-law insisted that there should always be a loaf of bread on the table at meals. On today’s daf, we find a possible talmudic origin for that custom. As we now know, the Temple’s Golden Table was never without its loaves of lechem hapanim, the showbread. A mishnah on today’s daf explains the weekly ritual for replacing the showbread that ensured the table was never empty, not even for a moment:
Four priests enter, two with the two arrangements of the new showbread in their hands and two with the two bowls of frankincense in their hands. And four priests precede them, entering the Sanctuary before them, two to take the two arrangements of the old showbread from the table, and two to take the two bowls of frankincense away. Those bringing the new showbread stand in the north and their faces are to the south, and those removing the old stand in the south and their faces are to the north. These priests draw the old and those priests place the new, and for each handbreadth of (the old showbread) that is removed, a handbreadth (of the new showbread) is added, as it is stated: “And you shall set upon the table showbread before Me always” (Exodus 25:30).
The rabbis in the Gemara liken the requirement of keeping showbread on the Golden Table to their understanding of a much more immediately relevant mitzvah derived from Joshua 1:8: “This Torah scroll shall not depart from your mouth…” Torah, like bread, is meant to be constant, always in our mouths.
Yet the daf quickly moves from constancy to something more complicated: What happens when Torah does, in fact, depart? The Talmud takes seriously the possibility of forgetfulness and loss, but makes room for them within the sacred. A beraita cited by Rav Yosef turns to a verse from Deuteronomy describing the second set of tablets: “And I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke, and you shall put them in the Ark” (Deuteronomy 10:1–2). From this, the rabbis derive a striking principle: Both the intact tablets and the shattered pieces of the first tablets were placed together in the Ark of the Covenant. This, in turn, teaches that just as the broken tablets retain their sanctity, so too a Torah scholar who has forgotten their learning through illness or circumstances beyond their control is treated with dignity befitting the learning they once possessed.
The Talmud doesn’t stop there. Reish Lakish offers a bold theological twist:
Sometimes the apparent dereliction of the study of Torah is its foundation, as it is written: “And the Lord said to Moses: Hew for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write upon the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which (asher) you broke” (Exodus 34:1). The word asher is an allusion to the fact that the Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Moses: Your strength is true (yishar kohakha) in that you broke the tablets.
Reish Lakish reads the Torah’s use of the word asher (“which”) as a deliberate pun on the word yashar, part of a phrase that means “well done.” He imagines that God, as it were, congratulated Moses for shattering the first set of tablets! Why? The act was destructive but also necessary for a new beginning.
How might this apply in our own lives? After all, we are unlikely to be faced with a situation as extreme as Moses, who destroyed God’s own writing to save a people from descending further into idolatry. Rashi suggests examples that may come up for us: Sometimes we may need to set aside Torah study in order to fulfill other mitzvot, such as participating in a wedding or comforting mourners at a funeral. But other rabbinic voices push the idea further. In the Jerusalem Talmud (Taanit 23a), the breaking of the tablets becomes a dramatic moment of divine-human tension. A midrash imagines a kind of tug-of-war between God and Moses, each grasping the tablets, with Moses ultimately pulling them down to earth, where they shatter. God’s response is not anger, but affirmation: “You did well in breaking them.”
This is a daring image. Perhaps when Moses won that tug-of-war with God, that was the moment Judaism really began. The destruction of those first tablets paved the way for teshuvah, return and renewal. It’s an image that will be expanded in later rabbinic and mystical sources on Tikkun Olam, gathering up and repairing the world’s broken fragments.
The same page of Talmud that speaks of broken tablets in the Ark can invite us to rethink how we hold our own lives. If the Ark contains both wholeness and fragmentation, perhaps so do we. Our youthful ideals, our accomplishments, our clarity, all matter. So do the broken pieces: the losses, failures and disappointments from which we grew. Those fragments, too, deserve reverence.
May we learn to honor all the broken pieces of our lives and our world, holding them with care and courage. And perhaps give ourselves a “yasher koach” for those times when, like Moses, we grasped hold and refused to let go, so that brokenness became the very foundation of something new.
Read all of Menachot 99 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on April 20, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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