A Failure of Imagination

A Failure of Imagination: D’var Torah for Parashat Ki Tissa
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
March 9, 2012

Way up in the cliffs of Mt. Sinai, in an enraptured scene—one can imagine Moses shielding his eyes from the terrible fire and windstorm—God was writing down the Ten Commandments with God’s own hand. Simultaneously, down below, Aaron, Moses’s brother, acceding to the will of the Israelites, was busy creating for them a Golden Calf.

The irony of this downfall is bitter. It hasn’t been more than 100 days since the Israelites saw God’s mighty hand parting the Red Sea. Barely a week or two since they heard God’s very voice telling them not to create any molten imagery, not to worship any foreign gods. But just let Moses disappear a few days, and they forget everything, resorting to common imagery and immoral behavior.

Add to that the fact that in this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tissa (Ex. 30:11-34:35), just prior to the Golden Calf incident, God had just finished giving Moses directions for building the Holy Tabernacle along with all the holy ritual tools—including the seven-branched candelabra, the famous gold Menorah. All of that is disregarded, however, as the rebellious Israelites cast all their gold jewelry into a great fire, and—in Aaron’s words—a golden calf randomly leaps out!

It’s a juxtaposition of two worlds, one the world the Israelites saw around them, in the behavior and practice of other peoples; the other, the world that God would have them imagine and create. In the first, sacred cows and divine bulls prompted fertility rites and even human sacrifice. It was a world in which nature—random and amoral—was the most powerful force around. To worship nature meant to participate—to take part in and mimic—the process of life-procreation-death that humans observed all around them. The powerful bull represented the physical and full potential of the anima, the spirit, within us. There was, there could be, no more.

But the world that God wanted us to live in was different. It was one of possibilities made real, a world of dreams and visions where humans transcended the animal within them and reached for the divine instead. It would be a new, improved world of justice, morality and compassion.

In the pagan world, the bull represented the finality of potential; in the world that Moses envisioned, God represents the eternality of potential. This isn’t the best of all possible worlds, Moses taught. But it is a starting point for something better.

The failure of the ancient Israelites to comprehend this is understandable. Used to specific and exact directions for every deed and action, their power of imagination has atrophied. The lofty goals Moses had set for them proved—at least for the moment—too high and inaccessible.

The sin of the Israelites was not in the failure of their faith, but rather in their failure to imagine. It’s useless to ask a newborn child to create a masterful work of art. The world God and Moses envisioned was—for the moment, at least—an impossibility. And so the people gave in to frustration, resorting to the kind of base rituals they saw others perform. That image of a bull in its infancy was all they were capable of seeing at that moment.

The fury with which God and Moses react initially is understandable, but to his great credit, Moses soon begins to defend the Israelites. He pleads their case, even resorts to an ultimatum: If God does not forgive Israel, Moses threatens to recuse himself, to retire from the role in history and theology that God had assigned him.

It’s a wonderful argument, full of pleading and finger pointing, accusation and recrimination. But little by little Moses gets his way. God will forgive the people; Moses will continue leading them; God will be in their midst—imageless, but imagined in as many ways as one can envision.

Having shattered to pieces the first set of carved Ten Commandments—the set God created with His own finger—Moses creates a new set. This time around, it’s in his own handwriting, made as legible as possible, the more easily to be deciphered and comprehended. Moses brings us to a new stage in our understanding of God. We humans are not expected to do what only God can—the creation of the world. All God can expect of us is to continue, painfully, laboriously, in the all-too-human work of improving it. That is to be—for all time—our role in God’s world.


It is in this Torah portion that we find the famous words we sing every Friday night: V’shamru v’nai Yisrael et ha-Shabbat: “The Children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath, to observe the Sabbath throughout their generations, for an eternal covenant. It is a sign between me and the Children of Israel for ever: for in six days Adonai made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day God rested, and was refreshed” (Ex. 31:16-17).

This eternal sign—Shabbat—is the foremost symbol of our partnership with God, forged in the fires of history. Not a golden calf or any other, lesser, image will do. Our connection to God is not material or physical. Its substance is that of which dreams and visions are created. Its realm is a promise waiting to be fulfilled. It reminds us of the possible, if we persevere; of the not-yet, but nonetheless eminent, if only we persist.


©2012 by Boaz D. Heilman