God’s Presence Among Us: Ki Tissa

God’s Presence Among Us

D’var Torah for Parashat Ki Tissa

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

Broken relationships are the hardest to mend.  There’s mistrust, loss of faith, deep questioning of the love we thought was there.  Self-doubt creeps in, darkening the very space we occupy.  Sometimes we question ourselves as much as the other person.

Though time heals all—sometimes with the help of a caring friend—the initial anger, hurt and loss are real and intense.

Sometimes there’s more damage.  Collateral damage.  Things get broken.

And it all happens so suddenly, with little warning.  One minute all’s well, the next everything is in shambles.

Rebuilding a relationship is a much longer process.  It takes effort and a deep desire to heal the rift that had appeared.  We have to recognize that something yet remains there, some foundation or basis to build upon, a reason to continue.

If successful, the relationship, once restored, is stronger than before.  Forged both with doubt and new-found experience, what emerges is sturdier, perhaps even more supple for the lessons that we might have learned about ourselves and about one another.

Ki Tissa, this weeks Torah portion (Ex. 30:11—34:35) takes us through the whole cycle.  As the portion begins, Moses is instructed to take a census of the Israelites.  Since counting people as numbers was always considered morally wrong, Moses is commanded to charge an “enrollment fee” of every Israelite 20 years and up.  A half-shekel, not much even back then, is to be raised from each individual.  No more and no less, showing equality before God, the half-shekel binds the individual in a threefold relationship: with God, with Moses and with the entire Israelite nation.

After some further instruction regarding the construction of the Tabernacle, God gives the Israelites the gift of Shabbat (Ex. 31:16-17, also known as “V’shamru”).  Shabbat is to be the spiritual sign of the eternal Covenant binding the people to God.  

Moses then climbs up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments—the written contract between Israel and God. 

And here, at this most auspicious moment, is exactly when everything falls apart.  Moses tarries too long on the mountaintop; the people, afraid that something may have happened to “that man,” the singular individual through whom God exclusively spoke, ask for another image, a visible symbol of God’s presence among them.  Aaron, Moses’s brother and the first High Priest, complies, though not very eagerly.  Despite all his attempts at procrastination, he manages to collect enough gold to create a molten idol, a golden calf.  He declares a holiday to celebrate the apparition, and the people eagerly gather to revel in all sorts of merriment.

The sound of celebration reaches God and Moses.  Shocked by what he sees, Moses smashes the two tablets of stone on which God had imprinted the Commandments.  In great anger, God, too, withdraws, momentarily disavowing the Israelites—going as far as to call them “Moses’s people.”  In his own anger, Moses commands the Levites to slay “every man… his brother, every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.”  3000 men die that fateful day.

It takes fine negotiation to return matters to the way they had been before this downfall.  Moses pleads with God, coaxing one reluctant concession after another.  Finally God agrees to new terms, a new Covenant between Him and the people.  God will not abandon the people, not even when they sin, but there are to be consequences to all their deeds.  As already promised, first to Noah and then to Abraham, only the guilty would be punished.  The others would have to prove their devotion to God.  Trust would gradually be restored.  Only then would we be able to move on past this terrible conflagration.

This Covenant—the third such agreement between God and humanity—is to be the crowning piece for Moses.  Limiting the extent of God’s violent anger to four generations means that down the line, ultimate forgiveness is possible.  Nothing comes by itself, of course.  The people have to show their remorse; they must repeat the oath of faith they had taken, incising it even more deeply into their hearts and souls.  And, in everything they do, the must abide by their word.

In achieving these terms of forgiveness, Moses proves himself a master negotiator, one we can all learn from.  His tactics are nothing short of brilliant.  Yet where he stands apart from all other analysts and therapists is in the great love he shows both God and the Israelites.  He may have had his issues; he may have had moments of insecurity, moments of great and explosive anger.  Yet overarching them all is his great and deep compassion for this people so desperate to have God’s proven presence in their midst.  Are they so different from any child who has found himself without home or parent?  Inexperienced, vulnerable, filled with fears, children grasp at straws, reaching for any hand they might see extended toward them—in innocence or in guile.  So too, the people.  They simply—and naively—needed some physical manifestation in place of the man and prophet who went missing on them.  Anything would do—even a pathetic, dumb, unseeing calf, barely able to stand on its own legs.

The two tablets of stone that Moses carves again after this terrible incident represent a new stage in our relationship with God.  The Ten Commandments—this time around written by Moses, not by God—form the foundation stone upon which the entire Jewish faith has come to stand.

The Golden Calf was only a mirage, a deceptive image of God, which we allowed to blind us for a moment.  What replaced this false impression was something much more tangible, more concrete and more present than any idol ever could be.  From that moment on, it would be God’s words, first carved in stone, then written on parchment, that would signify God’s presence among us.

“That man, Moses,” has disappeared yet again, as he did that early morning in the Sinai Wilderness.  Only this time around, his voice remains with us.  Repeated, transmitted and taught throughout the generations, it is the voice of Moses we hear when we chant Torah; it is his teaching and his lessons we imbue when we discuss Torah. 

And it is within the silences, in the soundless spaces between the words, in the love and longing, in the eternal and unbroken chain that links parent to child and teacher to disciple, that God becomes apparent to us.  God is thus present and real today just as on the day when the words were first uttered, amidst lightning and thunder, “I am Adonai, your God who has taken you out of Egypt to be My people.”

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman