Shabbat Ki Tisa 17 Adar I 5768, Feb 23, 2008

Efrat, Israel – Efrat, Israel - “And it shall come to pass while My glory passes by I shall put you in the cleft of the rock, and will cover you with My hand…” (Exodus 33:22).

What is true spirituality? Is it to be found in an Indian Ashram or at an esoteric Kabbalah center? Ought not our Bible itself be the best source for at least Jewish Spirituality? After the Revelation at Mt. Sinai, we find in this week’s portion, Ki Tisa, a second ‘revelation’, the revelation which I believe holds the key to the unique spirituality desired by G-d.

That events surrounding the creation of the Golden Calf echo a dilemma implicit in the creation of the first human being. We read in Genesis that G-d says, “Let us create man in our image,” (1:26) an expression distinctly different from what G-d says during the previous five days of creation. ‘Our,’ the Ramban explains is G-d speaking to the physical world of creation. He has brought into the world heretofore as well as to Himself, as it were. The human being shall be comprised of everything in creation, his lower self subject to all the limitations of the physical and animal worlds: birth, development, decay, death, as well as requirements for nutrition, excretion, rest and sexual reproduction, but at the same time, his higher self a veritable reflection (shadow) of the Divine (tzel, tzelem), containing a soul which is “a portion of G-d from on high”. “In the capacity of his body, he will be similar to the earth from which he was taken,” the Ramban phrases it, “and in spirit he will be similar to higher beings because the spirit is not a body, and will not die.” (loc. cit.); the spirit of every individual is a part of G-d!

Hence every human being, complex and even dualistic, is engaged in a life-long battle over which aspect of himself will gain ascendancy, the divine or the bestial, the positive force towards life and development or the negative force towards death and destruction. And since our physical properties are also divine creations, the greatest challenge facing us is how to energize every aspect of our beings, physical and spiritual together in service of G-d and humanity.

And the first commandment which Moses brought down from Sinai is the declaration to believe in a G-d who is not removed from this world, who is willing to descend from His unfathomable supernal heights to appear in a lowly, pricky thornbush and to free a nation from slavery, a G-d concerned in uplifting ennobling sanctifying. But the second commandment immediately warns against worshiping false gods, idolatrous images created from the sun and the moon, the animals and the beasts, objects which are more obviously accessible and readily touchable than the spiritual, ethereal, incorporeal G-d of creation and freedom. So how do we, corporeal creatures, reach out to G-d? How do we make contact with Him, feel and communicate with Him in our daily earthly lives?

The Israelites in Egypt and the desert had a head-start: they had Moses, a human being who spoke to G-d “mouth to mouth”, a mortal son of mortal parents who developed his “active intellect” to such an extent that it kissed the Divine Active Intellect and divined the Divine Will. But now Moses was gone, and the bereft Israelites feared that their prophetic leader might never return. They lost their bridge, their conduit to G-d – and in their panic they substituted one of G-d’s physical creations for that conduit, the calf which symbolized vigorous physical strength and the gold which symbolized resistant physical endurance. But once they chose purely physical symbols to help them to reach out for G-d, they lapsed into an idealization of the physical – and into a hedonistic debauchery which almost caused the Divine to give up on them completely!

Hence, after Moses returns to them and gains for his errant nation Divine forgiveness, he seeks from G-d
a deeper revelation: “Show me your ways...” (Exodus 33:13), he asks G-d, and several verses later continues to plead for a “vision of G-d’s glory” (33:18).

What Moses wants is for G-d to teach him how the Israelites can reach out to Him without a prophet as great as he is, how the people can approach G-d without resorting to the idealization, the idolatry, of physical objects.

First G-d warns that no human being – not even Moses himself - can ‘see’ G-d’s glory and live, can see G-d’s face and understand Him completely. But it is possible to see G-d’s “back”, to catch some glimpse, albeit imperfect, into the Divine. The following day Moses is to hide in a cleft of a rock, clutching in his hands two new hewed-out tablets. And then G-d’s glory will pass by, that imperfect yet detailed glimpse into G-d which humanity is allowed to perceive: “The Lord of love, the Lord of love , G-d, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in love and truth, keeping mercy unto the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity, transgression and sin, and who cleanses the guilty” (Exodus 34:6-7).

G-d is telling Moses and Israel that He is not physical, but that there is an aspect of His Divine essence, thirteen attributes, thirteen intellectual and spiritual characteristics, which can and must be idealized and realized by human beings; insofar as the human being expresses these characteristics of freely giving and unconditional love, of kindness and truth, the human being is reaching out to G-d and bringing the Divine into this world.

In effect, these thirteen Divine attributes are less of a theological statement and more of an anthropological and humanistical statement. After all, a central command is for us humans to walk in the Divine ways, and as the Talmud and Maimonides teach “just as He is loving, so must we be loving, just as He is compassionate, so must we be compassionate”.

As Maimonides cites at the conclusion of Guide to the Perplexed, citing the ninth chapter of the prophet Jeremiah “Thus says the Lord, let the wise not revel in their wisdom, let the wealthy not revel in their wealth, let the strong not revel in their strength, but in this ought he who would revel, revel: know and understand me, for I am the G-d of love who does lovingkindness, justice and compassion on earth. Those are the things I desire, says G-d”.

Shabbat Shalom
Shlomo Riskin
Chancellor Ohr Torah Stone
Chief Rabbi - Efrat Israel