“We will do and we will hear”

“We will do and we will hear” is the declaration through which the Jews, as Zeidy recounts it, accepted the Torah’s laws before hearing them in full. In the narrator’s family, the phrase expresses a binding collective commitment; her private uncertainty about having chosen it exposes the distance between inherited religious obligation and personal consent.

The Declaration and Its Meaning

At Shavuos, the family eats separate dairy and meat meals to recall the commandments accepted at Mount Sinai. The festive meal includes cheesecake and cheese-filled kreplach, followed after a half-hour wait by smoked turkey, chicken, and chopped liver. Zeidy explains that separating milk and meat represents the sacrifices involved in keeping the Torah’s laws. The declaration “We will do and we will hear” embodies the order of that commitment: the Jews agreed to observe the commandments before hearing them, an act Zeidy presents as a source of pride and as evidence of blind faith.

A Covenant That Binds

After the meal, Zeidy invokes the Midrash’s teaching that every Jewish soul was present when the Torah was handed down. In his account, the family’s presence at Mount Sinai means that the commitment belongs to each of them, whether or not they remember making it. He argues that rejecting any law would make a person a hypocrite, because the responsibility had already been accepted; no Jewish soul is exempt. The phrase thus works not merely as a recollection of a sacred response but as the basis for an ongoing claim of obligation.

The Narrator’s Doubt

The narrator questions how old her soul would have to be to have been at Mount Sinai, then wonders whether she agreed simply because she wanted to fit in and was afraid to think differently aloud. That inward hesitation complicates Zeidy’s confident account of unanimous acceptance: the collective declaration is presented as settled, while the narrator cannot be sure that her own assent would have been freely chosen.

She also distinguishes the covenant with God from the commitment Zeidy made to the Satmar Rebbe fifty years earlier. Zeidy pledged allegiance before he knew what the proposed community would entail, binding his family and future generations to it. The narrator recalls that his family in Europe had been educated, lived in homes with wooden floors and Persian carpets, and traveled freely across the Continent. Set beside that family history, the declaration about Mount Sinai acquires a further resonance: the narrator is questioning not only a sacred obligation described as ancient, but also the later communal allegiance that came to shape her family’s life.