In the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London stands a plaster cast of Michelangelo’s Moses. Moses sits tense and alert, the tablets containing the Ten Commandments in hand, his body coiled. The sculpture raises a question that has occupied viewers for centuries: what moment in the Biblical story is Michelangelo depicting?
Traditional art historians read the figure as Moses just after he comes down from Mount Sinai and sees the people worshipping the Golden Calf. He is still holding the tablets, but he now sees that Israel has broken the covenant with God by violating the prohibition against idolatry. The sculpture captures the moment before he smashes the tablets, as he absorbs what has happened and prepares to respond.
Sigmund Freud, however, famously disagreed. Rather than focusing on the biblical storyline, Freud read the sculpture psychologically. For him, this is not rage unleashed but rage mastered—a study in self-control.
A third possibility emerges when we slow down and trace the Torah’s sequence more carefully. The Torah actually describes two descents from Sinai and two sets of tablets. After the sin of the Golden Calf, Moses protests God’s desire to destroy the Jewish people for worshipping false gods. God forgives them and instructs Moses to carve new tablets and ascend the mountain once more. Moses remains on Sinai for forty days and forty nights, and afterward descends again — this time with a radiant face.
Seen in this light, a detail often dismissed as artistic license becomes decisive: the tablets in Michelangelo’s Moses are blank. If this were Moses’ first descent from Sinai, the tablets would already be inscribed with God’s writing. Blank tablets instead point to the moment after the first tablets have been shattered, but before Moses ascends the mountain again to receive a second set—the moment just before the work of repair begins.
This relates to another famous detail in Michelangelo’s sculpture: Moses’ horns. Why would Michelangelo depict Moses with horns? The answer lies in a mistranslation. After Moses descends from the mountain and then ascends again to seek forgiveness, he comes down a second time, and the Torah describes his face as radiant. The Hebrew word for “radiant,” keren, also means “horn,” and this ambiguity was mistakenly rendered as horns in some translations—an error that later fed antisemitic myths. In this sculpture, however, the horns help locate the scene in the biblical narrative. Moses becomes radiant only after securing divine forgiveness and the renewal of the covenant.
That radiance is not something Moses himself perceives. He has no mirror and does not know that his face has changed. The horns, intended to represent radiance, therefore support the idea that Michelangelo is depicting Moses mid-encounter—already altered by standing before God, but not yet conscious of that change.
Why does this matter beyond art-historical curiosity? Because Moses models perseverance—the refusal to abandon God or his people after their betrayal.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks repeatedly returned to this episode as the defining moment of covenantal leadership. Leadership, he argued, means staying with a flawed community, choosing repair over replacement, commitment over escape.
This is the Moses that Michelangelo gives us—not the man about to shatter the tablets in rage, or even restraining his anger, but the leader standing once more before God, blank tablets in hand, insisting on a second chance.
That unyielding commitment is what Moses models in the aftermath of failure. Parshat Mishpatim teaches that freedom survives when we return, blank tablets in hand, ready to begin again.
Ilana Epstein is Rebbetzin of Mizrachi Melbourne, serving alongside her husband, Rabbi Daniel Epstein, Rabbi of the community. Prior to moving to Australia, they served at Western Marble Arch Synagogue in London, previously the Cockfosters and North Southgate community, following seventeen years living and working in Israel.
Ilana is a writer and programme developer with experience in Jewish leadership and Holocaust education. She has led educational delegations to Poland with the Holocaust Educational Trust and March of the Living UK since 2015. In 2024, she was commissioned to write historical material for the adaptation of The Tattooist of Auschwitz.
Ilana has served as Director of Educational Projects at Jewish Futures and previously as an educator for the United Synagogue. She devised and leads a development programme for the wives of European rabbis on behalf of the Conference of European Rabbis, and was selected as an inaugural Sacks Scholar in 2023.
This essay was written as part of our collaboration with The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Sacks Scholars.
