March 2016
Rabbi’s Letter
by Margie Klein
Dear Friends,
This month, I want to share with you the words of my dvar Torah on Parashat Ki Tissa, which reflect both on the Torah portion on how I hope we can move forward as a community as we pursue social action work together.
Last week’s Torah portion, Ki Tissa, tells the story of the Golden Calf. Many of you know the story, but I hope my reading of the story and some of the commentaries on it can give us some insights as we might move forward as a congregation. Here’s the story.
Moses goes up Mt. Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments while the Israelites wait at the foot of the mountain. After forty days and nights of waiting, the Israelites start to get antsy. They decide to take all their gold, melt it together, and fashion a giant idol molded into the shape of a calf. Despite all of God’s miracles that the people witnessed as they were liberated from Egypt, the Israelites want to worship a God they can see, and make the Golden Calf for just that purpose.
When Moses finally comes down carrying the Ten Commandments, he sees what is going on, and is furious. Moses smashes the tablets that God had made and written upon. At this point, God tells Moses that God is going to destroy the Israelites. Even though Moses is angry at the Israelites, he defends them and pleads for God to give them another chance. God grants the request, and Moses heads back up the mountain for another 40 days and 40 nights for the Ten Commandments, Take Two.
This time, the process of creating the 10 commandments is a little different. The first time, the Torah reports: “The tablets were of God’s workmanship and the writing was God’s writing.” The second time, after the Golden Calf, the Torah says, “God said to Moses, ‘Carve yourself two tablets of stone, and I shall write upon them the words that were on the first tablets that you broke.” (Exodus 34:1)
What was the difference between the first and second tablets? There are myriad answers from a host of Bible commentators, but I want to share with you a teaching from the founder and rector of my rabbinical school, Rabbi Art Green. Rabbi Green writes,
The first tablets were fashioned entirely by God…. Israel was overwhelmed by all this divinity and felt unable to live up to the standards of the covenant that had been imposed upon it. Hence the flight to the Golden Calf….
By the time of the second tablets, God had learned a lesson about dealing with these humans….This time the tablets were to be a joint divine-human project. Moses does the carving, God does the writing.
So, as Rabbi Green reconstructs the Golden Calf story, God realizes that humans will only accept God’s law if they know that humans had a role in creating them.
Now, for a more radical rereading of the story, by the Chassidic Apter Rebbe. If you are not familiar with him, the Apter Rebbe was also the grandfather of the great 20th century theologian and teacher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Apter Rebbe’s commentary springs from a curious remark in the Torah. The Torah says that after Moses brings the second tablets of the 10 commandments down from Mt. Sinai and the Israelites begin to travel again, they not only carry the new tablets with them — they also carry the broken set of tablets.
So the Apter Rebbe asks, “What is the point of bringing along the old broken tablets?” and he offers what I think is a profound explanation, though one that departs from the pshat, the plain meaning of the text. The Apter Rebbe teaches that when Moses comes down and sees the Golden Calf, he realizes that the people are not going to be able to accept the first tablets, because they want to be part of the process. So Moses smashes the tablets so that the people, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, can put the Ten Commandments back together again. Moshe does this because he knows that the people will only accept the tablets if they are part of fashioning them.
In the Apter Rebbe’s interpretation, it isn’t that Moses forms the new tablets and then God writes on them. The partnership of God and Moses – the greatest leader our people have ever had – even that is not enough. Rather, Moses has to give the broken tablets back to the people, and they have to put them back together, so that the whole community can play a role in creating the rules they will all live by. In fact, in the Apter Rebbe’s retelling of this story, the Israelites carry both sets of tablets because the second tablets are actually made of the first tablets. I believe Rabbi Green’s and the Apter Rebbe’s interpretations together point to some powerful lessons for our community about the nature of leadership and growth.
As many of you know, I am passionate about social justice work, and want to encourage members of our congregation to get involved in working for opportunity and dignity for all. As the spiritual leader of the congregation, and as the one with the microphone, I have the power to tell you what I think we should be doing. Sometimes you will agree with me. Other times you will not. Yet, as I have been learning, if the selection of issues and invitation to action only come from me — it really does not work. It can feel forced, like I am dictating what you are supposed to care about.
So last year, when I urged people in our congregation to sign voter pledge cards around a particular issue, though I had the best of intentions, the result was that instead of the congregation feeling motivated – many of you felt uncomfortable or even alienated. For this I am truly sorry. So I hope that I — and all of us – can learn the lessons from this week’s Torah portion. Like the Israelites in the desert trying to find their way, we also have to move forward – and I hope that our Torah portion’s lesson on collaborative leadership can help us chart a path.
Learning from the story of the tablets, I believe that if the community can play a vital role in shaping our policies and choosing our issues, everyone will feel more comfortable and confident in working on them together not only as individuals, but as a congregation. It is for this reason that, over the next few months, the board and I are going to be sharing some options of possible directions for our social action work, and then the community will be able to vote on which direction we want to head.
Once we choose an issue to work on, of course, there will be some people who disagree, and no one will be required to do anything they don’t feel like doing. More importantly, and perhaps more difficult, because we our are a congregation that honors a diversity of opinions, we have to continue to respect the opinions of people with whom we disagree. All of us must continue to feel that this is our home. Yet, by participating in a process together of deciding how to move forward, it is my hope that we can share a sense of ownership over the outcome, and give our blessing to those who do choose to participate.
Finally, echoing Apter Rebbe’s teaching about how the Israelites made the new tablets out of the first, shattered set, it is my hope that any prior tension or discord can be a catalyst for forging social action efforts that will be more powerful and prophetic than anything I could have put forward myself.
I close with a blessing. May we all feel a sense of ownership and agency in our community. May we have the wisdom to build something strong and lasting from what was once broken. And may we be blessed to act as God’s partner in the world to create justice and dignity for all God’s children.