Dvar Torah: Ki Tissa 5779 (Justin Wise)

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 25 February 2019

“Forget your perfect offering, There’s a crack in everything, a crack in everything” sang Leonard Cohen. “It’s how the light gets in”.

 

It’s so easy to want to look only for what’s good in the world, to turn away from the cracks, from the brokenness. It soothes us, makes us feel better. But as the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead says,  life is always “stubborn fact and creative response”. When we won’t look at the stubborn facts of life truthfully, accurately, when we call out nostalgically for a world that was, or when we insist upon looking at the world in a partial way, only noticing what suits us or reassures us, we are always left powerless. And to willingly leave ourselves powerless is to give up our responsibility.

 

As we’ll see, the Rabbis of the ancient midrash saw how human it is to want to turn away, to absolve ourselves from difficulty, to have a quiet life. They were even prepared to say that God sometimes wants this too, and that God is mistaken. And if God is mistaken, we are implicated every time we find ourselves turning away.

 

What we’ve just read could be called ‘a parashah of broken pieces’.

 

For a while it looked like it was all going to be just perfect.  The story of redemption was going to work out beautifully. We left the land of Egypt, safely crossed the sea, were provided with miraculous sources of food in the wilderness, made it to Sinai, experienced en-mass an extraordinary moment of revelation, and were on the way to a land filled with the promise of abundance and security.

 

And now, here, in the middle of the desert, it’s all falling apart. Moses – the leader everyone has come to rely on to make sense of the confusing and overwhelming events of recent months – has disappeared up the mountain for a long time. For a little too long says Rashi. He’s late – later than the people can bear. And in his absence, in their fear and anxiety that he may never return, they’ve made a surrogate, a proxy-god, or a proxy-parent, a golden calf beautiful enough and majestic enough and big enough to reassure them, to have them forget the magnitude of the events they’ve been through, to have them forget how afraid they are. It’s a disaster, to many of the commentaries. Or perhaps, as the contemporary commentator Aviva Zornberg writes,  it’s a deeply human response to the overwhelming trauma of Exodus and revelation .

 

But self-centred and short-sighted, or an understandable response to intense trauma, the people have turned away from what is and now Moses stands at the foot of the mountain, filled with rage at the people dancing round the golden calf, certain that they have chosen the wrong path. And on the ground around him, the fragments of the two tablets, the ones made and written by God, shattered by his own hand.

 

What happened to the broken pieces, you may ask? I’ll come back to that in a moment.

 

But for now,  the question posed by the parasha – how should we respond to the world’s brokenness? What should we do when life falls so far short of the perfection and simplicity we demand of it? Is it permissible to close our eyes to what is?

 

Should we retreat into comfortable fictions,  into what will have us feel better? Or should we turn towards life with all of its complexity, even if we don’t like what we find?

 

The premise of the haftarah we’re going to read in a few minutes is that even God sometimes wants to turn away. It is, as has been our practice in Kollot, taken from Rabbinic literature and is from one of the oldest layers of midrash, the Pesikta D’Rav Kahane. It draws attention to a change in God’s language between the beginning of Exodus and where we are now.

 

Before the Exodus, God says to Moses: “I will send you to Pharaoh and you shall free my people, Israel, from Egypt”. And here, in the shadow of the golden calf and the shattered tablets “Hurry down the mountain Moses, because your people, who you brought out of Egypt, are acting terribly. I will destroy them so I can make of you, Moses, a new, great people”.

 

“Not so fast!” Moses says to God. “When the people sin, you call them ‘mine’ but when they are free from sin they are called ‘Yours’? You, the Ruler of the Universe, do not get to go to sleep to reality when things don’t go the way you intended. Even you, Eternal One, especially you, have a responsibility to meet the situation head on. Whichever way the people are, sinful or sinless, they belong to you”.

The people turn away from the enormity of what they’re being asked to take on, by building the golden calf. God turns away from responsibility for what’s happening by disowning the people and demanding their destruction. And Moses, and the Rabbis, say ‘no – this is not a way to respond creatively and ethically to the stubborn facts that life presents to us’.

 

And that brings us back to what happened to the broken pieces of the shattered tablets, the tablets that Moses broke instead of looking away, the tablets that he smashed when he found the truthfulness of his anger at what he saw happening around him. The tablets that he broke when he didn’t look away.

 

In one commentary there are two arks carried through the desert, one with the complete tablets written later by Moses, and one with the shards of the shattered tablets. But in another commentary, which you can find in the Talmudic Tractate Berachot, ‘Both the tablets of the Covenant and the broken tablets are placed [side by side] in the [same] Ark’.  The broken and the whole belong together, two sides of one another.

 

There is no wholeness without brokenness. There is no life without imperfection. There is no possibility unless we’re prepared to face what we don’t like about how life is. There is no responsibility if we turn away. The cracks, even if we don’t want to see them, are how the light gets in.

 

And the cracks are also how our capacity to love most fully gets in. Which is why Moses, in our haftara, would not stop speaking dearly about the people ,until God changed, until God shifted God’s relationship with what was happening, until God once again accepted ownership of the people and renounced the punishment that God intended to bring upon God’s people.

 

And if the Jewish ethical position is that instead of turning away from the world we must speak lovingly and truthfully so that we and others can turn towards how things really are, then there is a special urgency in our times, which we see afresh in a week in which a major UN report finds that we have so degraded the world’s biodiversity by the way we grow food that the very safety of our food sources, and our society is at profound risk, in a month in which we’re facing fresh news about the rate of melting of the massive ice-stocks of both Greenland and the Himalayas,  and in which alarming research into the decline of insect life across the planet shows us how much we are in danger if we continue to see the world just as we want to see it, if we won’t look at the cracks that we are finding out are very much of our own making.

 

Will we make ourselves more golden calves to dance around, shielding ourselves from the stubborn reality that threatens to overwhelm us? Or will we learn, like Moses, to face our tendency to pretend, and look instead with clear eyes at what’s happening? Will we break with assumptions that we’ve held dear, to stand among the broken pieces we’ve made and see the light that can come through them if we act?

 

And will we follow the example of many thousands of young people around the world who spoke out last week on climate change and learn to speak dearly, and angrily, and lovingly about the fragile and beautiful world that supports us, once again accepting that it we belong to the world and life just as much as they belong to us?