Parashat Ki Tisa
Dr. Ariel Resnikoff, Jewish Studies Teacher
In this week’s Torah portion, Ki Tisa—meaning literally “when you take”—the Israelites grow impatient with Moses, who is communing with God at the summit of Mount Sinai, and they begin to construct a golden calf as a form of hedonistic revolt. Upon descending the Mountain carrying the ‘tablets of testimony’ engraved with the ten commandments, Moses becomes enraged when he finds the Israelites dancing around the calf in idolatrous worship. In a fury, he smashes the tablets, before assembling them anew and ascending the mountain once again for God to reinscribe them with ten more commandments.
The Babylonian Talmud comments that when Moses smashed the tablets, God approved and supported his decision. Moreover, Rashi notes that at the close of the Torah, when the scripture praises Moses for “all the great wonders that he performed before the eyes of the Jewish people,” that the central wonder the Torah is referring to is in fact the smashing of the tablets. But why would the shattering of the tablets be understood as an accomplishment rather than a blunder? Why would the dismantling of something precious be taken as a wonder and not as a failure?
I’ve been having an ongoing conversation with my dear friend and colleague, Evan Wolkenstein, which constellates around this very question. Evan is a deeply talented and dedicated writer, and he had, of late, been struggling with a novel that he’s been working on for the past two years. One morning last week Evan arrived at JCHS and remarked to me: “Ariel, I scrapped the whole thing and started over—and I can’t tell you how good it feels.” My first thought when he said this was, my goodness, how courageous, to be willing to recognize when something is beyond the threshold of repair, and to let it go, rather than attempting to fix the irreparable.
I’m also reminded here of a bit of rich literary lore relating to Ernest Hemingway’s early writings (a far stretch from Ki Tisa, I know, but bear with me!) In the early-1920s, Hemingway was living in Switzerland covering the Lausanne Peace Conference for the Toronto Daily Star. His wife at the time, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, decided to bring all his writings—the original manuscripts and their only duplicates—with her when she visited Hemingway in Switzerland, so he could continue working on his short stories. But the suitcase she packed the papers in was stolen at the train station in Paris, and all of Hemingway’s early writings vanished. The writer was deeply distraught at first, but later admitted that this unfortunate incident was ultimately the greatest gift he had ever received as an artist—a chance to start over.
This I believe is what Moses offered the Israelites and God (and their sacred relationship) when he smashed the tablets at the foot of Mount Sinai: a clean slate. This is the wonder that the Talmud and later Rashi recognize as Moses’s greatest feat as a leader, that he did not try to repair the irreparable, but instead had the courage to change course all together and start over from scratch.
As we enter this Shabbat on the heels of Purim, I bless our community that we have the fortitude and vision of Moses our ancestor, and of Wolk, our teacher, colleague and friend, to sense when enough is enough, and to overturn the known in order to take a plunge into new and fresh beginnings—whatever they may be—when the time is ripe.
