Ki Tissa 5771 - English

KI TISSA 5771

Shemot - Exodus 30:11-34:35

15 Adar I 5771 – February 19, 2011

Rabbi Mario Gurevich

Beth Israel Synagogue, Aruba

In this week’s parashah, we read the famous episode of the golden calf. Only a few weeks after the Revelation at Sinai, and in the absence of Moses, who went up the mountain but has not yet returned, the people ask Aaron to make them a god that will take them back to Egypt (Ex. 32:1).

There is something in this story that I have never understood. The Revelation, as it is written in the Torah, was a grandiose and sublime event, terrifying from time to time, and always overwhelming; destined to not be forgotten by anyone who had the privilege of being witness, that is, the entire people of Israel.

However, just a few weeks later, Moses’ absence causes the people to forget not just what they saw and experienced, but to commit a terrible apostasy as well. They forget they have heard God’s voice directly; they forget that He presented Himself as the God who took them out of the land of Egypt and the house of servitude, and so they decide to build a metal idol, for the purpose of guiding them on their return journey to Egypt and slavery. Of course, we could resort to Achad Ha’am’s words, who said, “It was easier to bring the Jews out of Egypt than to draw Egypt out of the Jews.”

This being true, I still cannot find any explanation for that collective amnesia, and especially at so short a distance in time to the events told. The only explanation I can find is that forgetting the experience of God is inherent in human beings, who can have an extraordinary memory for other things, but not for the great events of the spirit.

I think that eventually, we too experience small revelations here and there, in the thousand and one ways that God has to show Himself: in the birth of our children, when we experience the miracle of life; before a sunset, when we appreciate the beauty and harmony of the universe; in a starry night, when we cannot help but feel our smallness before the magnitude of the constellations.

But we quickly forget those sensations, those almost mystical experiences, and go back to our day-to-day and often insignificant ways. Somehow, we resort to the creation of false gods, to guide us to places where we reasonably don’t really want to be.

The people of Israel who went out of Egypt moved, smoothly and almost immediately, from the greatest sacred experience of any nation to the lowest level of coarse conduct and forgetfulness.

Is this, perhaps, a historical constant? Or a genetic pattern?

Is it that God no longer manifests Himself, or that we continue forgetting Him, as quickly as our ancestors?

Perhaps we should do small daily memory exercises, to try to remember the last time – maybe yesterday? – when we felt God’s presence in ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom.