וַיִּקַּח סֵפֶר הַבְּרִית וַיִּקְרָא בְּאׇזְנֵי הָעָם וַיֹּאמְרוּ כֹּל אֲשֶׁר־דִּבֶּר ה' נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמָע׃

Then he took the record of the covenant and read it aloud to the people. And they said, “All that Hashem has spoken we will do and we will hear!” (24:7)

The Talmud in Shabbat 88a states, "When Israel declared ‘We will do’ before ‘We will hear,’ 600,000 ministering angels came and tied two crowns to each and every member of the Jewish people, one corresponding to ‘We will do’ and one corresponding to ‘We will hear.’"

Note how the Talmud doesn’t state that they recieved two crowns for declaring both “We will do” and “We will hear,” but because they declared “We will do” before “We will hear.” Why did specifically declaring one before the other merit them those two crowns?

What do these two declarations of “We will do” and “We will hear” actually mean? According to the Zohar (the foundational work of Kabbalah which contains interpretation of the Torah), “We will do” was an acceptance to perform Mitzvot and “We will hear” was an acceptance to study Torah.

Torah study, writes Rabbi Yosef Dov Soloveitchik (1820-1892) in his commentary Bais HaLevi on the Torah, has two goals. One is to inform us what the Mitzvot of Hashem are and how to perform them. The second purpose is to study Torah for its own sake. Even after one knows all the Mitzvot and their laws and is fully equipped to fulfill them to the last detail, one is still obligated to study Torah because studying the word of Hashem is a goal unto itself.

Therefore writes Bais HaLevi if the Jewish people would have declared, “We will hear”,i.e we will study Torah before “We will do,” i.e we will perform Mitzvot, their declaration would have been understood as we will study Torah so that we will be able to perform Mitzvot. That would mean that once they have accomplished that, there is no more reason to study Torah. Essentially what we have here is one commitment with two parts to it. The commitment is “We will do” just that there is a commitment to study Torah to enable the fulfillment of “We will do.”

Now that they declared “We will do” before “We will hear,” their words are to be understood in the following manner. We will do Mitzvot which can only be accomplished if we study Torah beforehand so that we can know what the Mitzvot are and how to fulfill them. The instructional aspect of Torah study is automatically included in that declaration.

When they declared afterwards, “We will hear,” which means we will study Torah , that means that they will study Torah beyond its facilitation to perform Mitzvot. They’ll study it for its own sake because it is the word of Hashem.

The result of that is that now we have two commitments. One to perform Mitzvot and one to study Torah as a goal unto itself. That’s why because they declared “We will do” before “We will hear” they merited to receive two crowns.

Shabbat Shalom!
Yitzchak