Ki Tisa: Scared and Staying
Let's start with a question:
When have you felt scared or uncertain because someone or something you count on wasn’t where you expected them or it to be?
That feeling - that hollow, anxious, where are you? feeling - is sitting at the heart of this week's parsha.
We are forty days into Moses being up on Mount Sinai. Forty. Days. More than a month. Three months since we left Egypt.
The Torah tells us in Exodus 32:1:
"When the people saw that Moses was late in coming down from the mountain, the people gathered against Aaron and said to him: 'Rise up, make us gods who will go before us - for this man Moses, who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.'"
Notice what they say. They don't say "Moses abandoned us."
They say: "We don't know what has happened to him."
This is not rebellion. This is panic. Fear.
Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin - known as the Netziv - teaches that the people weren't trying to replace God. They were trying to find certainty.
Then we get to verse 2 and it gets worse.
Aaron says, "Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me."
Why does Aaron go along with this? He knows better! He is the High Priest!
Rabbi Sharon Brous teaches that Aaron's failure here is the failure of leadership under pressure. He caves to the crowd not because he wants a golden calf, but because he cannot tolerate the discomfort of the people's pain. He mistakes relieving their anxiety for serving their needs.
Those are not the same thing.
Sometimes the most loving thing a leader, parent, or friend can do is hold us with love as they allow us to experience fear and sit with our uncertainty believing that we are strong enough to find our way through it.
By verse 3, the people bring their gold, and Aaron makes the golden calf. Rabbi Rachel Adler has written about the Golden Calf as a story about what happens when people or a community have not yet learned to hold onto God in the absence of external signs. The Israelites wanted God to be visible, concrete, here. They hadn't yet developed the ability to remain in relationship
even when the other party is temporarily out of touch.
When the Mishnah in Avot (4:1) asks: "Who is strong?” and answers, “One who conquers their own impulses," the rabbis are aware that one of the hardest impulses to conquer is the impulse to flee from uncertainty, to fill silence with noise, to replace an absent God with a present idol.
That’s why Rabbi Mike Harvey wants us to ask ourselves:
What are our golden calves?
Some of us reach for our phones. Some reach for food or away from food. Some reach for anger.
Some of us get very, very busy, so we don't have to sit with the uncertainty.
None of those golden calves are inherently evil, but they can become a substitute for what we actually need when we are afraid.
If we have been scared lately, like our ancestors waiting for Moses, if we have felt the absence of something or someone we need, this parsha is for us. We are not alone in reaching for something solid when the ground feels uncertain. That is human. That is ancient. That has been true since before Sinai.
Rabbi Ariel is much less interested in the question why did our ancestors fail, and much more interested in asking what do we do with our fear?
Do we reach for something hollow? Do we run? Or do we lean into relationships that are vast and steady?
Do we let our fear control us, or inform us?
Can we build something real together when things feel uncertain - not a calf, not a distraction - actual relationships that hold each other through the scary forty-day stretches? Can we hold one another with love and allow each other to experience fear and sit with uncertainty and believe that we are strong enough to find our way through it?
Can we stay in the not-knowing, in the waiting, in the silence where Moses used to be?
The message of Ki Tisa isn’t don’t be afraid, it’s not to let our fear write our story.
We need something to hold onto, and this story in Ki Tisa will get to that.
But first, there is rupture. Real rupture.
Let’s be honest about the part of the story after verse 3. Moses calls the Levites to take up swords against the idolators. Three thousand people are killed. The God of Ki Tisa even sends a plague to punish those who survive.
This is not a God many of us feel comfortable with, and we shouldn’t. We don't have to pretend we are, and it’s not only me who says so.
Rabbi Tamar Elad-Appelbaum and Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg both teach that honest communal memory means wrestling with this text, not to endorse it, but because grappling with it is how we develop ethical and spiritual maturity. In other words, rather than run from our discomfort, they call us to challenge the text.
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson offers that from his perspective the violent passages in Torah reflect an early and incomplete human understanding of the Divine - that God is not a fixed, all-powerful ruler handing down punishments, but a relational presence that grows and deepens in conversation with humanity.
I think it’s possible the God of Ki Tisa is the God written by scared people. Terrified people. People in a panic.
Maybe Ki Tisa is also asking us not to let our fear write God’s story.
The Torah continues after the rupture.
The covenant continues, too.
Two chapters later, God tells Moses:
"I will make all My goodness pass before you."
There is a choice to stay in it even though the world is scary.
Rabbi Shai Held says that for him, the Golden Calf story is ultimately about the persistence of relationship.
Yes, the people failed. Badly. God failed, too. But the God of this story is not one who walks away from a covenant because of failure and, at the end of the day, neither do we.
This God stuff is complicated. Human experience is messy. And maybe if the text is an early and incomplete understanding - a draft - of a human-divine relationship, maybe we are a next draft. Maybe if we can be informed by our fears and not controlled by them, we can find a way to wait in the uncertainty for whatever is coming down the mountain and write a story that is worthy of all of us standing at the foot of that mountain, scared, and staying.
Shabbat Shalom.