Parahat Ki Tasi

I’ve talked a little about the events of this weeks Torah portion already. The key event this week is the incident of the Golden Calf. This event is probably the one that has generated the most commentary in the entire bible. I can’t possibly do it justice, but what I want to do is talk about one issue and one meta issue that this story brings up.

First a brief run down of events, remember that the text of the Torah is not always if chronological order. The Jewish nation left Egypt, crossed the Sea of Reeds and is camped at the foot of Mount Sinai. G-d speaks to the entire Jewish nation and gives them the 10 Commandments. Moses is told to go up the mountain for 40 days and 40 nights so that G-d can give him the entire Torah. Moses does so and G-d gives him all 613 commandments, and the principles of how to apply them – the Oral Law (the written torah is dictated to Moses over the next 40 years in the desert). The Jewish Nation miscounts the 40 days and thinks they are up without Moses returning; they think he has died. The “mixed multitudes’ build an idol. Moses comes down after the 40 days are up and sees what has happened. He smashes the tablets, crushes the golden calf and deals with the problem. Once that is done he goes back up the mountain to plead with G-d to have mercy on the people. G-d has mercy; Moses engraves the new set of tablets and comes back down. The day that Moses comes back down is Yom Kippur. It’s the first time that the entire nation pleaded with G-d for mercy and forgiveness. That’s why we do the same every year.

So the obvious question to ask is how, after just hearing G-d seek directly to you and tell you not to engage in idolatry, how can you go and build an idol? The answer has 2 parts, what did they build, and who build it.

Don’t think for a second that after experiencing what the people just did that they would make an idol to replace G-d. What they were doing is making a replacement for Moses. When the people looked at Moses, they could feel G-d’s presence. Now that they thought Moses was dead, they were afraid they would loose that feeling. They wanted to build something that would show them that G-d was still with them. So they were not worshiping another G-d, but they did make a graven image, which was expectedly forbidden in the 10 Commandments, hence the punishment.

The other part of the answer is who built it? The text tells us that it was the “mixed multitudes’. What does that mean. The Midrash tells us that after the 10 plagues, when the Jews left Egypt, many Egyptians were so impressed by what they saw, that they joined the Jews and went out of Egypt with them. Moses accepted them as ‘converts”. Various sources tell us that there were as many as 600,000 of them. The problem was that they grew up as worshiping idols, and that’s how they knew how to relate to G-d. So when the going got tough, some of them reverted partially back to their old ways.

The midrashim tell us that the number of people who were actively involved in the building and worshiping of the Golden Calf numbered about 3000. Which is 1/10th of 1% of the total group camped at the mountain. Most of the Jews had nothing to do with it. Their sin was that they did nothing to stop it.

That brings us to the meta issue that I wanted to talk about. If it was only 3000 Egyptian converts who were involved, why does the text of the Torah put the blame on all of Israel? The concept is that of collective punishment. The Jewish people are all parts of a whole (that’s why at the start of this week’s portion, Moses takes a census by collecting a half shekel - not a full shekel - from each person). And this whole has a collective mission in this world. This responsibility is to bring the truth of one G-d to the world. Because of this awesome mission, we have to be accountable for our fellow Jews. To borrow fro an earlier Torah portion; “Am I my brother’s keeper”? For the Jews the answer is yes.

This is an idea that we as a people exhibit to this very day. Every time a Jew, anywhere in the world, does anything wrong, we all fell a little bit of sadness. Because we know that we are all parts of one body. This, of course, relates back to my Kippah discussion of a few days ago.

Shabbat Shalom.