Dear TBZ Community,
As we fade out from the Purim celebrations this week, I am still holding onto the complexity of the messages of this holiday. Purim is an opportunity to bring everything upside down and lift up joy – and we do that very well at TBZ. Oh, we had a great time on Monday night, at TBZ! We also stopped before reading chapters 9-10 in Megillat Esther (the Book of Esther), the chapters where the fate of the Jews is turned around. Instead of being killed, the Jews struck at their enemies with the sword, slaying and destroying them and all their children. And as the megillah tells us, in the fortress Shushan, the Jews killed a total of five hundred men and killed seventy-five thousand of their foes. As we stopped for a few moments before reading this, I invited us to recognize the dangers and problematic messages of our text: what does it mean to survive and escape oppression, only to become oppressors? We rejected that message and prayed for peace and for a time that there are no more oppressors nor people oppressed in our world.
As this message continued to linger after the celebrations, I realized that there is a profound connection between the complexity of survivors becoming oppressors and Ki Tisa (When You Elevate). This week’s parasha (Torah portion) tells us the well-known story of the golden calf. We read in Exodus 32:1,
וַיַּרְא הָעָם כִּי־בֹשֵׁשׁ מֹשֶׁה לָרֶדֶת מִן־הָהָר
וַיִּקָּהֵל הָעָם עַל־אַהֲרֹן וַיֹּאמְרוּ אֵלָיו
קוּם עֲשֵׂה־לָנוּ אֱלֹהִים אֲשֶׁר יֵלְכוּ לְפָנֵינוּ
כִּי־זֶה מֹשֶׁה הָאִישׁ אֲשֶׁר הֶעֱלָנוּ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם לֹא יָדַעְנוּ מֶה־הָיָה לוֹ
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him,
“Come, make us a god who shall go before us, for that fellow Moses
—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—
we do not know what has happened to him.”
Why do the people build this golden calf? Perhaps it can be explained as a response to fear: Moshe, their leader, the one who took them out of Egypt and saved them from Pharaoh, has not returned from the mountain. The people, for the first time since leaving Egypt, are alone without Moshe’s physical presence. The Targum (Arameic translation to the Tanach/Hebrew Bible) understands the word boshesh – בֹשֵׁשׁ as Moshe was late! Perhaps Moshe was late, later than the people could abide, and they became impatient, and then fearful, and then hopeless. And so they built something, however misguided, to dampen fear and ignite hope.
Often we think of the sin of the golden calf as the people rejecting God, the God that took them out of Egypt and liberated them, but that is not really what happened. They do not reject God, they miss God, so they decide to “make god.” The sin of the golden calf is not that they serve another god, but that they confuse God, thinking that the golden calf was God, the God that took them from Egypt and liberated them:
וַיִּקַּח מִיָּדָם וַיָּצַר אֹתוֹ בַּחֶרֶט וַיַּעֲשֵׂהוּ עֵגֶל מַסֵּכָה וַיֹּאמְרוּ אֵלֶּה אֱלֹהֶיךָ יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲשֶׁר הֶעֱלוּךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם
This he took from them and cast in a mold, and made it into a molten calf. And they exclaimed, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!”
וַיַּרְא אַהֲרֹן וַיִּבֶן מִזְבֵּחַ לְפָנָיו וַיִּקְרָא אַהֲרֹן וַיֹּאמַר חַג לַיהֹוָה מָחָר
When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it; and Aaron announced: “Tomorrow shall be a festival of Adonai!” (Exodus 32:4-5)
Idolatry can then be understood not as the service to another, a different God, but as the service of what we think is God or what we think we do in the name of God.
And that is perhaps one of the most dangerous things we can do in the name of religion. Thinking that what God wants from us is to kill others, oppress others, slay others, is a form of idolatry. Yes, our stories often depict our struggles for liberation, redemption, and victory with violence, but our tradition carries in it the most radical messages of compassion and empathy for the suffering of others. Soon, on Passover, we will be reminded of the well-known midrash that tells us that God stops the angels from singing when the Egyptians drown in the sea, saying “My children are drowning in the sea, and you are singing?”God’s children are also the people of Israel’s enemy and as God shows compassion for them, we ought to do the same.
In the name of religion, people call for violence. In the name of Judaism, people burn villages and build societies of hatred. That is the same as building a golden calf. A golden calf that seems to be a reflection of the God who liberated us from Egypt, but it is not.
May we know and learn to emulate God’s compassion in the world. May we know to find in our religious practice a path for compassion and love, and not a path for violence and hatred.
May this Shabbat bring renewal and blessings to all of you and your loved ones.
May we find strength, courage, and patience, and open our hearts with generosity.
May all those who are ill find healing. And may we have a joyful, sweet, and peaceful Shabbat.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rav Claudia