Broken Tablets

Asher - Can also mean approval, authorization. - Hashem approved and praised Moses for breaking the tablets.

והמכתב מכתב אלו-הים הוא, ....... The reason the details written here have been delayed is to draw our attention to the fact that what Moses was about to smash was something so extraordinary that the very idea that he would smash it is mind-boggling. This is how Nachmanides accounts for the positioning of this verse at this point. While this makes sense, the bigger problem is how Moses, the trusted servant of the Lord, could initiate such an act of deliberately destroying G’d’s handiwork without having obtained G’d’s permission to do so.
If, due to Israel’s sin, they had forfeited the right to receive the Tablets, Moses should have returned them to G’d!
Alternatively, he should have asked G’d what to do with them.
When a mortal king dispatches a sealed document to someone by means of a messenger and the messenger is unable to make delivery because the recipients do not want to accept said document, a loyal servant brings the document back to his king explaining that he was unable to deliver it. He would most certainly not treat it disrespectfully by tearing it up!
The reason that Moses smashed the Tablets was that he had observed that the letters on it had already flown away (Shemot Rabbah 46,1) as soon as he was approaching the area where the calf was positioned, an area which had become defiled by the calf’s very presence. In other words, continuing with our parable, the king’s seal had already disappeared, so that the rest of the document was no longer of any value.

We may compare the Tablets themselves and the writing on them to the relationship between body and soul. The Tablets were the body, the writing was the soul. Once the soul has departed the body is of no value whatsoever. Such a dead body deserves to be buried under the earth. ....

(1) ...He started feeling bad that he broke the tablets, G-d told him: Do not feel bad about the first tablets, for they only contained the ten commandments, however in the second tablets I will give you, that they will have Halcaha Midrash and Agadah, this is what is said: (Job 11): I will tell you hidden wisdom for it shall be double comforting

As explained in ch. 4, we cannot ordinarily “grasp” G‑d with our intellect but only through Torah study. Realizing our inability to comprehend G‑dliness will thus explain how we do grasp Him through Torah.

When any intellect perceives and understands some intellectual subject, the mind grasps that subject and encompasses it,

and the subject is grasped and encompassed by, and is clothed within, the intellect that understood and perceived it.

The subject, which is now within the human intellect, is surrounded and encompassed by that intellect, much as a material object is surrounded by the hand that grasps it.

But the subject can be said to be within the mind only once the mind has fully understood it (as indicated also by the Alter Rebbe’s use of the past tense—“…the intellect that understood and perceived it”). Before mastering the subject, however, while the mind is engaged in analyzing its details, the subject is still “above” the mind, and the relationship between them is the reverse: the mind is “within” the subject and is encompassed by it.

In the Alter Rebbe’s words:

Also, the intellect is clothed within the subject at the time of intellectual comprehension and grasping.1