Ki-Tisa

http://etzion.org.il/vbm/english/archive/salt-shemot/21-17kitisa.htm

            The Torah in Parashat Ki-Tisa tells the famous story of chet ha-eigel – the sin of the golden calf – which began when the people approached Aharon and asked that he make for them an idol, “because this man, Moshe…we do not know what happened to him” (32:1).

 

            The Midrash Ha-gadol makes a comment on this verse which can perhaps shed light on Benei Yisrael’s precise concern that precipitated the sin of the calf: “They said: Perhaps the Almighty kept him [Moshe] near Him for consultation, or perhaps the destructive angels conspired against him and killed him.”  According to the Midrash Ha-gadol, Benei Yisrael envisioned two opposite scenarios: either God decided that Moshe belonged permanently in the heavens, or his venture to the heavens ended in calamity, as the heavenly hosts felt threatened by his intrusion and eliminated him.

 

            Worded differently, Benei Yisrael claimed that it was impossible for Moshe to spend forty days in the heavens and then return to earth to lead them.  He was either human or divine; he could not be both.  If he was human, then he could not possibly survive among the angels; and if he was divine, then he could not possibly return to lead a nation of ordinary men and women. 

 

            The Midrash Ha-gadol’s comments are likely based upon a careful reading of the people’s remark: “ki zeh Moshe ha-ish…” – “for this man, Moshe…”  Their concern was that “the man” Moshe was gone.  Even if Moshe remained alive, by that point, they feared, he was no longer a “man”; after spending so much time in the heavens, he could not possibly still be accessible to them or able to relate to them.  And thus they concluded that he was either dead or angelic.  Either way, they needed someone or something to take his place.

 

            The people’s mistake was denying the synthesis and integration between heaven and earth, the spiritual and the physical.  The Midrash (Devarim Rabba) famously describes Moshe, the “ish ha-Elokim” (Devarim 33:1), as “a man from the middle down, and God from the middle up.”  Moshe embodied the fusion between the physical and spiritual, demonstrating how a mortal, physical being can rise to great spiritual heights.  Benei Yisrael, it seems, were not prepared to recognize this potential, and thus concluded that Moshe was either a man who was killed trying to reach the heavens, or an angel who could never return to earth.  And they therefore created a deity which they could worship through unrestrained festivity and indulgence (“va-yakumu le-tzacheik” – 32:6).  They wanted a religious system that did not require “ascending to the heavens,” which allowed them to follow their instincts and impulses without the need for Godliness, for discipline and restraint.  Denying the possibility of fusing the physical and the spiritual, they sought a way to religiously sanction wanton indulgence.

 

            This perspective on cheit ha-eigel is beautifully expressed in the famous Midrashic description of the script of the commandments “flying” off the stone tablets when Moshe beheld the worship of the calf (see sources cited by Torah Sheleima to 32:19).  The Midrash tells that once the divinely-engraved letters left the stones, they became too heavy for Moshe to hold, and they fell to the ground.  The luchot represent what Torah life is – a physical existence (“stone”) bearing a spiritual imprint (“letters”).  If we deny the possibility of this existence, and we send the “letters” back to the heavens, then the “luchot” collapse.  Torah life is sustained by this fundamental recognition that we can rise to become an “ish Elokim,” physical creatures endowed with a heavenly quality.

 

            Benei Yisrael were, quite obviously, mistaken.  Moshe was neither killed nor forced to remain in the heavens.  Human beings are, indeed, capable of “ascending to the heavens” and then returning, of fusing our physical realities with loftier, spiritual meaning.