In Ki Tavo, the children of Israel are commanded to perform an inauguration ritual after they enter the Promised Land. In this ritual, the nation publicly commits itself to fulfilling the Torah’s commandments by reciting a list of curses and blessings on Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. This ritual, mentioned in Re’eh, is more fully described in Ki Tavo. As part of the ritual, the people are commanded to set up twelve giant stones upon which the Torah would be written in seventy languages. Traditional commentators considered the fact that there would be space enough to record the entire Torah seventy times a miracle.
One of the themes that has been repeatedly stressed throughout this book is the enduring relevance of the Torah. In this vein, it is important to note that many commentators expressed the belief that every phenomenon that has ever happened or will ever happen is alluded to in the Torah. (This notion is most succinctly conveyed by Ben Bag Bag in Pirkei Avot (5:26): “Turn it [the Torah] and turn it again for everything is in it.”) Until recently the notion that twelve stones could contain seventy different versions of the Torah probably did not attract a lot of attention. Today, though, this miracle gains fresh relevance because of the invention of the microchip. The increasingly vast amounts of information that can be encoded on smaller and smaller chips is alluded to by these twelve stones, which in turn allude to the miraculous notion of “the little that contains much” (Bereishit Rabbah 9:7).
Although by now we take technological advances as a given, it should not cease to amaze us that machines that once filled whole rooms and could perform a handful of functions now fit in the palms of our hands and have the capability of performing millions of functions per second. This miracle is alluded to by the seventy versions of the Torah written on the twelve stones.
