by Freda Eisenberg, delivered at Minyan M'at


I want to begin by reciting the shehecheyanu blessing, because this is my first d’var torah before maat — and anywhere, actually.

B’rucha at ya eloheinu ruach haolam shehecheyatnu v’kiy’matnu v’higiatnu lazman hazeh.
You are Blessed, Our God, Spirit of the World, who keeps us in life, who sustains us and who enables us to reach this season.

Now to the parsha. Oy! What a parsha. Long, dense, rich. After weeks of wandering in a desert of dry laws we return to the moist sea of narrative. It feels good on the skin, yes. But I for one find it hard to drink. This narrative is salty enough to make you choke.

It is a roiling ocean of emotions and dysfunctionality, stormy even for the bible. The Children of Israel get restless waiting for Moses and they begin to live up to their name and act like children. They get whiny. Like any labile tot, they forget the exceptional treats they’ve just consumed and ask for more, for new — for what the other kids have. Aaron, the babysitter, has a weak moment and gives in. He has his reasons. A little inferiority complex, a little jealously, both met with golden opportunity, if you’ll pardon the pun.

So God gets angry and threatens mass destruction. Moses manages to obtain a stay of execution, only to unleash his own rage just a bit later. He takes the matter into his own hands and orders — well, mass destruction. Not total, like god might have done, but a lot. And in what is, to modern sensibilities at least, a particularly cruel way, with neighbors killing neighbors, brothers killing brothers, fathers killing sons.

Possibly, and perversely, an even more disturbing image of Moses enraged is that of him grinding the golden calf into powder, adding it to the water and forcing the perpetrators to drink. What is that? It is the way pets are housetrained, with their terrified little noses shoved in their own filth after they’ve made a mistake about when and where to let themselves go. That image is a particularly vivid one for me because of the disparate levels of power, control and anger involved — the human master on the one hand, tall, upright, with the supposed ability to control himself, yet still incensed at the trespass of the dumb puppy who, on the other hand, shivers and cowers under the outstretched finger and the hiss of “Bad dog!” Like the Israelites, it was responding to a need. And when you are just growing up, are powerless and untutored, it’s tough to satisfy your needs in socially acceptable ways. The child screams, the dog poops, the Israelites danced.

Moses confronts Aaron and he receives such a feeble, childish, weasely explanation of what went on in his absence that it is embarrassingly painful to hear it. Who me? No, it was them. You know how wild they are. And then this thing, it just came out of the fire! it just happened! I’ve been given to understand that literary references go over well here, are indeed kind of de rigueur, so I’ll bring something up from my recent reading. A book called “How to be a Friend” by Marc Brown and Laurie Krasny Brown and, like a good deal of the literature I read this days, it’s pitched to the 5-10 year old crowd and I read it aloud. Over a couple of pages there’s a series of illustrated vignettes showing kids, as the title promises, how to be a friend. There’s also a spread with vignettes on how not to be a friend. Which one do you think Aaron’s in? He violates some very basic rules here. Don’t dump on your friends and don’t shift the blame. I wonder if Aaron might have been more forthright, or at least more sophisticated in his shiftiness, if he wasn’t in the regressive-making situation of speaking to his prodigy kid brother.

Presumably satisfied with his handling of things, Moses goes back to god to patch things up. But, takeh, that golden calf episode was wrenching. He’s still a little shaken and is taking the situation personally; he wants reassurance that he did the right thing. So, though he asks god to forgive the people, he does it in a kind of coy way seemingly designed to test his own standing and powers. Okay god, if you’re not going to forgive them, you can just forget about me too. God responds by telling him it’s alright, now buck up and just do what I tell ya.

But god doesn’t forgive. First, the Almighty smites a few extra sinners still lying around after the Moses-induced massacre, just to make sure the job is thoroughly done, and maybe, who knows, to exercise rank a little. Moses shouldn’t go around thinking he can take care of everything. Then God tells Moses to get back on track leading the people to the promised land. But don’t expect a divine escort on the way. They blew it. God is still so upset that if he just so much as goes near the remnant of that stiff-necked flock, he’ll lose it — and so will they. This could be construed as petulance. But you might also say that God is showing an awareness of his limitations. If he can’t quite control his anger he appreciates what will stimulate its eruption. He can imagine himself in a situation and predict his emotional reaction, and with this power can take steps to avoid a nasty consequence. That’s not one of the attributes recited when, later on in the parsha, god flashes Moses a glimpse of the divine backside. But in my book it’s pretty awesome.

It is also, I think, what distinguishes our celestial leader from his earthly protégé. When Moses hears about the golden calf from god, the only reaction we are privileged to see is his concern for the immediate crisis. Don’t do it! he appeals. It’ll look bad. Not in front of the goyyim. He doesn’t plead guilty and ask for clemency. Nor does he commiserate with god, saying Wow, what a betrayal… but maybe there’s a better way to deal with it. He hasn’t really digested the news. He’s heard it, but he hasn’t felt it. Which is why when he’s up om the mountain he can ask god Why be so angry? Coming down he gets his answer. Being there, fully present, makes all the difference.
We don’t always know how we will react. That is our humanity. Always knowing, mastering ourselves completely — that I suppose is divinity. Knowing more often than not — well, that is something to strive for. It’s called maturity.

Perhaps it was in recognition of the power and value of experience that Moses then seeks to know god better by seeing his glory. Perhaps he has learned that sometimes you just gotta be there to get it. And god says sure, perhaps because he knows the request to be reasonable and true. That while language engages the mind, presence engages the heart. That letting Moses see his back was not a fluffy bit of show and tell or a special favor but a necessary thing.

The parsha tells us something else about thought and feeling, which is that they diminish with time, distance and distraction. God’s anger, like a lot of human anger, fades so that after a while when he and Moses are hanging out together in the Tent of Meeting, Moses can revisit the escort issue and have god relent. The Eytz Chaim commentary says the radiance that Moses’ face acquired after his intimate encounter with god would also fade with time, and would be renewed with each subsequent conference. I don’t necessarily see it in the text, maybe others here can, but I would like it to be there. For if even Moses could not retain a permanent glow from his closeness to god, how much more difficult for ordinary people to sustain whatever it is they got, we get, from a single encounter? This is where prayer comes in. The same text, day in, day out, week after week, year after year. Why do we do it? I’ve always loved the line from the Talking Heads song Psycho Killer that goes “Say something once, why say it again?” because it reverberates with the importance of repetition. The repetition of prayer is an opportunity for us to go back, to be present, to be renewed. To know ourselves wholly, with our minds and our hearts, and to seek the control and mature judgment that’s missing in this story.

Have a good musaf.

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