Friday, March 13, 2020

Shabbat Parah: Faith and Maturity


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Parshat KiTissa  Exodus 30:11 - 34:35

The Israelite journey from slavery to freedom can be described as a process of maturation. As slaves in Egypt they were as children who didn’t have to make decisions and had their daily life was set out for them. Leaving Egypt began a process of maturation, journeying through adolescence in the wilderness and ultimately entering adulthood as they stood to enter the Promised Land.

The Israelites were fully dependent on Moses, their substitute parent, from whom they received a semblance of stability. So what would happen when Moses went away? As with most children, they were likely not pleased when Moses went away but accepted a finite absence, one of forty days. The problem arose when the forty days passed and the promised return did not occur. Why would Moses be late coming down from the mountain? He had to know that the People would not do well without him.

The simplest explanation is that Moses was not late, that a counting error occurred. In his commentary on Ex 32:4, Rashi (12th century, France) explains that before ascending, Moses told the people that he would return at the end of forty days, within six hours from sunrise on the fortieth day. Rashi notes that Moses ascended in the morning, thus the first “day” of his ascent was not a complete Jewish day as Jewish days begin in the evening. By counting the day of ascent as the first day Moses would be expected to return a “day” earlier than he had planned. 

To complicate matters, the Talmud contains a Midrash that holds that the Satan got in on the action and caused darkness during the day so that the Israelites would become even more confused about timing. They end up waiting until the next morning and then begin the construction of the Golden Calf, a physical manifestation of a God that they could not see.

Why couldn’t they have waited even one more day? They acted like children whose parent went away and left them with a babysitter. Things would be okay as long as their parents returned when promised. When that date passed, the fear of abandonment would blossom. Aaron the babysitter was not Moses.

It’s a matter of maturity. It’s a matter of faith. What is faith but a belief in something that cannot be seen? The Israelites were at a stage where they could easily maintain belief in the intangible. They believed in God when miracles were being wrought but the force of each individual miracle quickly faded as everyday life took hold. Moses was their lifeline to God. They understood that Moses was their tangible link to an unknowable God. With Moses away, the link went away as well. Thus, when Moses didn’t return exactly on schedule as promised, the People reacted as children will – rashly.

I think the Rabbis understood this. Otherwise why create a midrash about the Satan stepping in to further scare and confuse the Israelites? They needed to come up with some explanation for the drastic action of reverting to the idolatry of Egypt after all that the Israelites had seen and experienced of God’s greatness. Extreme fear combined with a lack of maturity provides at least some sort of explanation for one of our ancestors’ most egregious acts of all time. 

For faith to truly inform and enhance our lives, we have to be mature enough to accept that there are things we do not understand. That “things” exist even if we cannot always see or sense them. Only then will we have this faith to hold on to in our most trying times. The Israelites didn’t possess the ability to hold on to faith and to use it to temper their responses to crisis. We do. The only question is whether or not we choose to acknowledge it.


May we all have the ability to hold on to faith and to keep wise heads about us during this world wide health crisis.
May the Original Healer keep us all healthy, safe and at peace.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbah Arlene

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