Do not ascend (oloh) My altar by steps, that your nakedness may not be exposed upon it. (Ex. 20:23)
The Torah could have just said, “The altar should have a ramp and not steps.” But it does not. So what is the text trying to tell us?
Consider the first person to build an altar: Noach. He was also the first person to use the word “ascend” – he brought an oloh, an ascent-offering.
Then Noah built an altar to G-d … he offered elevation offerings on the altar. (G: 8:20)
Noah is also the first person whose nakedness is exposed (the root word is shared with Adam and Eve after eating the fruit, but the identical word used for the ramp, “ervah,” is first found with Noah).
Could it be that the prohibition against exposing ourselves while trying to elevate to G-d is a direct result of the fact that the first person who elevated toward G-d degraded himself shortly afterward?
Does this not have broader wisdom for us all? Consider all the great and powerful men who ascended to the highest heights, and were brought low by entirely avoidable but deeply embarrassing personal failures.
Are not the “most elevated” men, in silly and perverse ways, also the weakest? There seems to be an innate desire in mankind to keep a balance between our elevation and our debasement. In this sense the biblical verse about exposing our nakedness while we ascend the altar is a version of “the higher you climb, the harder you fall,” but its literal text foreshadows the less hallowed adage: “the higher you climb, the more bottom shows.”
Might this connect to Yom Kippur? During mincha, when we are presumably at our holiest and furthest from moral weakness and failing, the Torah reading contains the list of forbidden sexual relations. Might this be an admission and a warning that humans perversely seek ways to self-destruct, especially when we should be at our most indestructible?