Parashat Vayakhel-Pekudei / פרשת ויקהל־פקודי
Torah Portion: Exodus 35:1 – 40:38

In an essay on this week’s Torah portion, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, an esteemed scholar and former Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, asks:

What do you do when your people has just made a golden calf, run riot and lost its sense of ethical and spiritual direction? How do you restore moral order – not just then in the days of Moses, but even now? The answer lies in the first word of today’s parsha: Vayakhel. (See http://www.rabbisacks.org/the-spirit-of-community-vayakhel-5775/.)

Referencing the debacle of the golden calf (Exodus 32), Rabbi Sacks points to a moment in the Torah when our people is divided, disillusioned, and focused only on their immediate needs. With this week’s Torah portion, however, unity, faith and purpose are restored when Moses assembles (vayakhel) the whole Israelite community, reminds them of the sanctity of Shabbat, and calls them to come together to construct the Tabernacle, God’s dwelling place in their midst. Sacks sees in this reconciliation of Israel with God an eternal lesson about the role of the faith community in countering the excesses of individualism, not only for the generation at Sinai but for us today as well.

Sacks merges the teachings of Charles Darwin and Alexis de Tocqueville to make an argument that in an ideal world faith communities would be critical to the functioning of a democratic society. For his part, Darwin demonstrates that though “the survival of the fittest” takes place on an individual level, human beings, nonetheless, survive as groups, utilizing language and communication, among other things, to create “larger and more flexible groups than other species” (Ibid.). This realization of Darwin’s helps explain a paradox:

If evolution is the struggle to survive, if the strong win and the weak go to the wall, then everywhere ruthlessness should prevail. But it doesn’t. All societies value altruism. (Ibid.)

For Tocqueville, religion functions to militate against this “ruthlessness” and enhance the “altruism” of which Darwin writes. These functions are essential to allowing democratic societies to flourish. Sacks writes:

The great danger in a democracy, said Tocqueville, is individualism. People come to care about themselves, not about others. As for the others, the danger is that people will leave their welfare to the government, a process that ends in the loss of liberty as the State takes on more and more of the responsibility for society as a whole. Ibid.)

Sacks argues that with separation of church and state religions are better able to create caring communities that decrease individuals’ reliance on the state for their welfare. Such reliance, Sacks believes, invites government intrusion into the personal lives of its citizens, which in turn leads to a deterioration of liberty.

Sacks concludes:

Vayakhel is thus no ordinary episode in the history of Israel. It marks the essential insight to emerge from the crisis of the golden calf. We find G-d in community. We develop virtue, strength of character, and a commitment to the common good in community. Community is local. It is society with a human face. It is not government. It is not the people we pay to look after the welfare of others. It is the work we do ourselves, together. Community is the antidote to individualism on the one hand and over-reliance on the state on the other. (Ibid.)

I wish Sacks’ idealism would become reality. However, since religious communities have yet to demonstrate their power to inculcate altruism universally and to reduce the human will toward power, I can’t accept his conclusion. Until religion evolves as Sacks would like, the state must act to ensure the welfare of its citizens.

That being said, I do believe Sacks expresses the loftiest goals of Judaism, if not all religions: to bring us closer to God and to create a more compassionate world. In my experience, the communal celebration of Shabbat and the communal effort to build community and repair the world have shown themselves to be two of the most transformative aspects of Jewish religion both for individuals and for the assembly of Israel.

---

Parashat Ki Tisa

Exodus 30:11-34:35

In case we forget the story about the Israelites’ ill-advised creation of a golden calf at the base of Mt. Sinai, Jewish tradition provides a ritual flare to jog our memories. During the High Holy Days we blow a shofar to awaken our souls to take an honest accounting of our deeds and to work to make change in those areas where we’ve fallen short. What we often overlook is the fact that the shofar itself must come from a kosher animal, such as a ram or a gazelle, but there is one kosher animal from which we may not make a shofar: a cow. Why? Perhaps, this is because using the horn of a cow (or a bull) as a shofar might have the opposite effect of that which is intended. Rather than lead us on the path of righteousness, a shofar from a bull might remind us of the incident of the golden calf and stir within us thoughts of idolatry and licentiousness.

Perhaps, too, there’s another reason: to teach us patience. It’s not that we have to search longer and harder for a ram’s horn than for a cow’s horn, and it’s not that it takes more time to blow a cow’s horn. I suppose the former is not the case, and I know nothing about the latter. No, the lesson about patience emerges not from any practical concern but from the story of the golden calf itself: as the Israelites grow impatient waiting for Moses to return from his 40-day-long campout atop Mt. Sinai, they seek an immediate fix for their pent-up craving for a connection to their God. In so doing, they press Aaron into fashioning a familiar representation of a deity out of the men’s gold jewelry (Supposedly, midrash teaches, the women refuse to hand over their bling.), outraging God to the point of wanting to obliterate the people, causing Moses to smash the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and setting off a series of drastic punishments by God and Moses against the Israelites, not to mention having Moses go back up for another 40 days to inscribe a new set of tablets (with a different set of commandments!). Patience truly is a virtue lacking in this sad tale.

The 11th-12th century Spanish philospher Judah Halevi in his work The Kuzari writes that the real sin of the Israelites is, in fact, their impatience. It was not in making the calf itself and celebrating a festival to God afterward. Scholar and rabbi Harvey Fields summarzes Halevi’s take by stating, first of all, only about 3000 of the 600,000 people who left Egypt actually requested that Aaron build the golden calf. It was hardly a majority of all the people. Furthermore, by building a “tangible object of worship like other nations” around them, they weren’t really rejecting God. As a matter of fact, one could argue that elsewhere in the Torah, God is the one who commands the people to make an object, i.e. the ark with the cherubim on top, as a marker of God’s presence. Halevi, Fields contends, sees no substantive difference between a golden calf and the ark with the cherubim. On the real sin of the Israelites, Fields writes:

Having waited so long for Moses to return, (the people) were overcome with frustration, confusion, and dissension. As a result, they divided into angry parties, differing with one another over what they should do. No long able to control their fears, a vocal minority pressured Aaron into taking their gold and cating into a golden calf…. If the people made a mistake, Halevi says, it was not in refusing to worship God, but in their impatience. Instead of waiting for the return of Moses or for a message from God, they took matters into their own hands and acted as if they had been commanded to replace their leader with a golden idol. Fields, Harvey J. A Torah Commentary for Our Time. (New York: UAHC Press, 1991). pp. 81-82.

The modern bible scholar Nehama Leibowitz disagrees with Halevi’s assessment of the nature of Israel’s sin, but draws a conclusion that could very well have come from Halevi himself. Leibowitz sees in the story a failure of leadershp on Aaron’s part and great sin on the part of the Israelites, to be sure. But ultimately, she suggests, the story points to the need for a sustained, deliberate commitment to study of Torah, a commitment that requires extraordinary patience. Fields explains that Leibowitz:

…sees in the story of the golden calf… a deliberate warning that human beings are capable of acting nobly at one moment and ugly at the next. Leibowitz observes that ‘we should not be astonished at the fact that the generation that heard the voice of the living God and had received the commandment ‘You shall not make other gods besides Me’ descend to the making of the golden calf forty days later. One single religious experience, however profoud, was not capable of changing the people from idol worshipers into monotheists. Only a prolonged disciplining in the laws of Torah directing every moment of their existence could accomplish that.’ (Studies in Shemot, pp. 554-556)

The Torah relates the tale of the Israelits’ sin to teach that yesterday’s charity may be followed tomorrow by selfishness and insensitivity. Each day is filled with new choices. The role of contant Torah study is to keep an individual asking, ‘What is the next mitzvah I must do?'” Ibid., p. 82.

Just as Halevi points out that a number of Israelites grow restless in Moses’ absence and take matters into their own hands beyond what God had commanded them, so, too, does Leibowitz show that human beings in all generations grow restless, or more accurately, distracted and indifferent, and fall back into old habits. Had the Israelites been more patient, they would have soon received the original Ten Commandments in pristine form. If people in our own day allow themselves the opportunity to study Torah and to develop spiritual practices over time, they will be more likely to make their study and their practice routine and, ultimately, to experience God in a consistent way, without having to reinvent the wheel everytime they have a longing.

We live in a fast-paced world that seems to get faster daily. Our attention spans follow suit; our minds and bodies have become conditioned to move from idea to idea, from activity to activity. We’ve lost the art of waiting quietly for change to take place over time. Maybe we should come back to the story of the golden calf more often to remind us of the dangers of our impatience.

Patience is, indeed, a sacred virtue well worth cultivating. Remember that next time you grow antsy waiting for the final blast of the shofar at the end of Yom Kippur.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Dan