For many, Judaism is first and foremost about the simple observance of authoritative commands: God said do this and don't do that; ours is but to obey. Holiness, wrote the influential if sometimes misguided philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, "is nothing but halakhic observance."

People who believe this will have a tough time dealing with the central story of Ki Tissa, this week's Torah reading. After communing with God on Mount Sinai for 40 days, Moses is instructed to go back down and deal with a sudden crisis:

Your people . . . have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed to it, and said: "This is your god, O Israel, who took you up out of the land of Egypt."

Moses descends into a changed world: troubled by his delay on the mountain, the Israelites have turned to idolatry! Taking the two tablets of the covenant that God has given him, Moses smashes them and enlists the Levites to restore order by the sword, re-establishing his and God's reign.

Moses' actions, some more violent than others, seem understandable enough. But why smash the tablets, the singular symbol of God's word and the only concrete manifestation of His law on earth? Besides, although God may have told Moses to deal with the crisis, He did not tell him how. This antinomian act was Moses' own choice.

And yet, God refrained from punishing Moses, or even protesting. His sole response: "Carve yourself two tablets of stone like the first ones . . . that you smashed." The rabbis of the Talmud took this as an endorsement—"Well done!" Then they went even farther, suggesting it was the only thing Moses could have done. "Sometimes," they concluded, "you need to destroy the Torah in order to affirm it."

How's that again?

Let's return to the golden calf. We usually think of the Bible's war against idolatry as a battle of the One God against the lumbering, whimsical many gods of the ancient world, whose existence implied a universe where nothing happened according to a single plan or standard. But here there is only one calf, and the problem doesn't seem to be polytheism. Instead, it is the problem of the graven image, of the symbol that we look to for a rush of faith and inspiration. It is the problem of the shining, beautiful thing that we point to in our hearts and say, "This is your god, O Israel, who took you up out of the land of Egypt."

The real sin of the calf was the Israelites' backsliding from the invisible, ineffable, ungraspable truths of the divine—truths that are anything but clear from the Torah's own words. Rather, they are truths that we independent, free individuals have to work hard all our lives to understand. The Second Commandment, against graven images, is really a warning about the dangers of symbolism—about the deceptive ease with which the picture, the slogan, the sound-bite can shove aside the deeper, more complex truths they are meant to signify and instead become the sole focus of our attention. To embrace such symbols as the key expression of religion is to risk becoming as shallow as they are. "Those who make them, or trust in them," the Psalmist says of idols, "shall become like them." Real truths are as invisible as God.

This is why the ancient rabbis refused for centuries to put their interpretations of the Bible in writing. As soon as morality is concretized in written rules, the temptation is great to turn ideas and principles into a potentially empty shell of rule, ritual, and obedience. Later on, when codes of Jewish law were first introduced, many rabbis again opposed them on similar grounds, citing the dangers inherent in studying rule books instead of the swirling, exhilarating seas of talmudic dispute and narrative. The Torah itself, which was written down, is the least code-like code ever written, its rules woven into a text that teems with stories, prophecies, and much else.

And that is also why the tablets with the Ten Commandments had to be shattered, and why Moses had to act on his own accord. God's message was much richer than the rules it contained, and the tablets represented far more than the words written on them. They were the beginning, not the end, of wisdom. As soon as their intended audience started worshipping a golden calf, the chances of the Israelites' understanding the deeper valences of the Ten Commandments had diminished to zero. Moses was now forced into a contest between one symbol and another, between gold and stone. It was a game he couldn't win.

Sometimes, you need to destroy the Torah in order to affirm it.

David Hazony's first book, The Ten Commandments, will be published in September by Scribner.