A Brick of Sapphire

A midrash which means more today than it ever did before

In response to the horrific events today in Israel, I have seen people discuss a particular midrash that is eerily apropos. The following is my own take on that midrash.

Towards the end of Parashat Mishpatim, which we will read this Shabbat, the Torah recounts the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai. Just before Moses ascends so that God can give him “the stone tablets, the Torah, and the commandment that I wrote in order to teach them,” (Shmot 24:12), the text tells a a short and mysterious story:

Moses and Aaron went up, along with Nadav, Avihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel. They saw the God of Israel, and under His feet was something like a sapphire brick, pure like the essence of heaven. But He did not send out His hand against the great men of the Children of Israel; they saw God, and ate and drank” (Shmot 24:9-11)

These words are clearly among the secrets of the Torah, and a person could unquestionably spend years decoding them. Doing so is not my goal today.

Instead, I would like to cite a midrashic interpretation of the “sapphire brick” which Moses, Aaron and the elders saw during their mystical vision at Mount Sinai - an interpretation which has more resonance today than on any previous day of my lifetime.

Rashi explains that this brick “was before Him during [Israel’s] enslavement, to remember the agony of Israel who were enslaved through making bricks.”

Targum Yonatan ben Uziel expounds further:

Under [God’s] throne was something like a sapphire stone - a reminder of the enslavement that the Egyptians enslaved Israel with mortar and bricks. There were women who would mold the mortar with their husbands. One delicate young pregnant girl was there, who miscarried [while mixing the mortar] and whose miscarried fetus was mixed into the mortar. [The angel] Gabriel descended and made this mortar into a brick, and raised it to the highest heavens…

A commentary on the Targum Yonatan, Perush Yonatan, cites an obscure, no longer fully extant collection of midrashim from the 13th century called Midrash Avkir, which offers even more detail:

One delicate young pregnant girl was there, and she miscarried her fetus, which sunk into the mortar. Once the Holy One, Blessed is He saw that the princes of the nations were finding ways to defend [the actions of the Egyptians], Gabriel created a hint by making the mortar into a brick and raising it to the highest heavens.

This midrash, expounded in the ancient past, could have been a sermon crafted by a creative scholar today, in February, 2025, in anticipation of this upcoming Shabbat.

Today we witnessed the disgraceful spectacle of Hamas placing four coffins on a stage as celebratory music loudly played in the background. The stage was decorated with pictures of Prime Minister Netanyahu as a vampire, and with slogans designed to strike fear into every Jewish person’s heart, and to dementedly blame Israel for the deaths of these hostages.¹ Countless Gazan civilians watched, took pictures, hooted, hollered, and cheered as those four coffins were carried to the waiting vehicles of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

These were the coffins containing the remains of Oded Lifshitz, whose remains were later identified by the National Institute of Forensic Medicine, and who was imprisoned by Palestinian Islamic Jihad and was assassinated over a year ago; and, presumably, the bodies of Shiri Bibas, her four-year-old son Ariel, and nine-month-old Kfir. We all still await definitive identification by the forensic specialists at Abu Kabir. We have learned, however, that as a final indignity, the coffins were locked with no keys to open them; and that Hamas inserted additional propaganda inside the coffins themselves.

What depths of depravity would lead terrorists to desecrate the coffins of dead hostages? Of dead children? Of a dead baby? Of dead victims whom they murdered?

What perversion of the human heart could cause civilians to joyfully watch this spectacle, celebrating the deaths of innocents? What degenerate and sadistic thinking leads human beings to believe that victims of kidnapping who were later slaughtered somehow deserved their fate?

No human being with a living soul can watch such cruelty without suffering a broken heart.

No human being who still maintains the image of God can look at the society Hamas created in Gaza as anything but vile, corrupt, and evil.

The cowardly soldiers of Hamas - those who hid in tunnels and only during the ceasefire dared to emerge and put on uniforms - laugh and mock their hostages, living and dead. They laugh and mock the Jewish people, openly saying that when they get stronger, they will do to the rest of us what they did to the Bibas family. And so many people across the world - the princes and the populace - find reasons to defend the evildoers, to justify that which demands condemnation.

This Shabbat we hear the story of the baby who died in Egyptian oppression, mixed into the mortar and cement… and the angel Gabriel took that baby and that mortar and that cement and fashioned a brick, which he placed under the feet of the Holy One, Blessed is He. And the Holy One heard the princes of the nations defending the Egyptians, who killed a baby and who killed children and who killed women and who killed men. Egyptians who mocked Israel and their devotion to their God. And the Holy One would always look at the hint, at the brick, and in the depths of divine wisdom where no man could ascend, somehow promise that the murder of a young woman’s baby would never go unavenged, and would, in an unaccountable way, be part of the pathway to meeting God at Mount Sinai.

I pray that the coffins carried by monsters today rise up before the Throne of Glory, and serve as the final spur so that He will again hear our cry, just as He did three thousand years ago: “And God heard their cries, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked at the Children of Israel, and God knew.” God knew what had to happen… and it did.

One delicate young woman was there, and then kidnapped and killed along with her tiny children. They were sunk deep in the depths of the earth, where their captors laughed and mocked and treated them like chips that could be exchanged for additional murderers. Once the Holy One, Blessed is He saw that the princes of the nations were finding ways to defend the actions of those killers, Gabriel created a hint by making their coffins into a brick and raising it to the highest heavens.

Please, God, look at the sapphire bricks that were disgraced today by those who hate you and your children. Please, God, know what has to happen. Please, God, answer our tears with your loving embrace. Please, God, allow your servants to overcome the evil that sometimes seems to have conquered the world.

Please, God. Return to us, that we may return to You.

1. Attorney Erica Le Bon easily demonstrates the absurdity of this claim at https://x.com/elicalebon/status/1892517273211949239