The weekly Torah portion of Ki Tisa * (Exodus 30:11 - 34:35)
The Book of Exodus has a peculiarity that it sandwiches the episode of the Golden Calf between the instructions for the building of the portable Tabernacle, the Levites who serve in it and various sacrificial offerings. In fact even though the worship of the Golden Calf took place first, the description and commands to build the Tabernacle start before it, say the Jewish Sages, to teach the point that the Torah as we have it is not meant to be a "chronologically correct" book.
The Torah Sages assert that "Ein Mukdam UmeUchar BaTorah" - There is no "Earlier" or "Later" in the Torah. The Torah has its own reasons and logic for the way it presents the unfolding of events in its narratives. Yet the most dramatic episode in this Torah portion is how the Children of Israel stooped so low as to worship a Golden Calf idol, one of the worst possible sins and crimes against God, about forty days after they experienced the declaration of the Ten Commandments from God. Yet God forgave them and thereby showed his love for the Children of Israel after those guilty of idol worship were punished.
This Torah portion covers the gamut of these events as noted in its fourteen sub-portions: 1. Instructions for a Census; 2. The Washstand 3. The Anointing Oil; 4.The Incense; 5. The Architects; 6. The Sabbath; 7 The Golden Calf; 8. Moses' Response; 9. Moses Descends; 10. Moses and the Decree; 11. Moses' Plea; 12. The Divine Glory; 13. The Second Tablets; 14. Moses Returns with the Tablets. (According to "Contents" in The Living Torah, by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan.)
After clearing up the mess and aftermath and fallout from the worship of the Golden Calf debacle, Moses again then goes up Mount Sinai to beg for forgiveness for the Children of Israel and then stays another forty days to carve out and receive the Second Ten Commandments on Two Tablets of sapphire stone after Moses had smashed the First Ten Commandments when he came down the first time and saw the people worshiping the Golden Calf. The final day when Moses came down with the Second Ten Commandments was Yom Kippur - the Day of Atonement when God finally forgave the Children of Israel for the sin of worshiping the Golden Calf.
The mystical commentaries teach that at the point that the Children of Israel were at Mount Sinai to receive the Torah from God at that time they attained the pure level of Adam and Eve before they sinned and ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. In other words by accepting the Torah from God the Children of Israel banished all evil and death, while after the sin of worshiping the Golden Calf they brought back evil and death into the world!
Yet through it all, God is a forgiving and loving God even though he is angered and even thinks of destroying the Children of Israel but Moses talks Him out of it. This will be the pattern and template of all Jewish History, that even though the Jewish People may face excruciating hardships and suffer great casualties, yet God will never abandon them because He will always forgive them since He loves them.
We can start from the present and work our way backwards in history to see how this works. No one would argue that the majority of Jews today are secular, assimilated and irreligious. In America with the largest Jewish population outside of Israel intermarriage is the order of the day for most of America's Jews. In Israel the majority of its non-religious Jewish population is determined to throw off the yoke of the influence that religious Jews may have in the land.
It would seem a hopeless situation if you were to figure out the odds of the survival of Judaism in both America and Israel. But we know that God forgives and is a loving God. There is thank God a strong growing large minority of devoted religious Jews in both America and Israel. There are many lovers of Eretz Yisrael who while not as personally religious as the very religious Jews, but they love their fellow Jews and the Land of Israel unconditionally and will sacrifice everything and even die to fight and protect their Jewish brothers and sisters. So all is not bleak and in return God forgives and loves the Jewish People in the present as well!
The Jews living in Israel are surrounded by hostile enemies that seek their destruction. Even before it was founded in 1948 Israel has been fighting for its survival against Arab and other enemies that seek its annihilation. Thousands of Jews have had to pay the ultimate price and have been murdered or killed in battle defending the Jewish homeland. The threats and dangers and casualties never stop, yet through it all God has never abandoned His people. On the contrary, Israel has only grown, at the time of its founding in 1948 Israel had a population of six hundred thousand, and since that time it has grown to a country with more than six million Jews living in it and prospering greatly. God in His mercy has not allowed the enemies of Israel to defeat it because of His love for the Jewish People.
In spite of communist repression in the former Soviet Union and in the lands it occupied where Jews were forced to divest themselves of Judaism and any connection to God and to the Land of Israel, there was nevertheless a rebirth of Jewish Pride and a desire to return to Zion among the masses of the formerly communist controlled Jews many of whom became Refuseniks and Prisoners of Zion and in spite of persecution, imprisonment and banishment to Siberia they persevered and ultimately triumphed over their evil persecutors. Although Jews had been at the forefront of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and had worshiped the false gods and idols of Communism, Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism, dancing to the tune of the Internationale as they touted their aggressive atheism, nevertheless God forgave them because of His great love for the Jewish People and allowed them to return to Eretz Yisrael to live in freedom and peace.
The terrible Holocaust by the Nazis wiped out a third of all known Jews with the death of the Six Million Jewish martyrs who died of beatings, starvation, Einsatzgruppen, Concentration Camps, shooting and Gas Chambers in death camps and in so many other cruel ways that at the height of World War Two seemed a hopeless situation as the "golden calf" of "might makes right" seemed to be triumphal as the Nazis and their allies smashed their way to conquering Europe and the world. Yet God in His mercy did not let the evil Nazi empire triumph but remembered his afflicted Jewish people and saved them from total destruction. Even though six million Jews were murdered in Europe, yet six million Jews survived in America, about three million in Russia and most importantly the 600,000 Jews living in the Land of Israel survived the Holocaust. Proof of God's love for the Jewish People in spite of the horrible losses they had suffered under the Nazis.
From the time of the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple almost 2000 years ago, Jews suffered from Inquisitions, Crusades, Pogroms, Blood Libels, yet never gave up their connection to their God, the Torah and Judaism.
It's valid to ask why were Jews treated so harshly? One explanation that is given by the classical Jewish commentaries is that at the time of the sin of worshiping the Golden Calf, God was so angry at the Children of Israel that He wanted to destroy them entirely but held back from doing so because He loved them too much. Instead, it was decreed by God that the punishment would be "paid out in installments" over the course of Jewish History and that therefore whenever the Jewish People are punished they receive some measure of that punishment as pay back for the worship of the Golden Calf.
The destruction by the Romans of the Second Jewish Temple about 2000 years ago, the destruction by the Babylonians of the First Jewish Temple about 2500 years ago, the destruction and exile by the Assyrians of the northern Kingdom of Israel and the exile of the Ten Lost Tribes about 2700 years ago were all tragic and cataclysmic events that brought about much death and suffering to the Israelite and Judean nation. Each event was a Holocaust in its time with lots of torturing, murdering, enslavement and exile of Jews. But each was preceded by their own form of idol worship. The Ten Tribes literally worshiped two golden idols built by King Jeroboam (c. 900 BCE).
The Jews during the time of the First Jewish Temple committed the three cardinal sins of idol worship, murder and sexual immorality. The Jews during the time of the Second Jewish Temple were guilty of Sinat Chinam, hating each other for no reason, and as a result all the terrible punishments ensued. But again, the principle that God will eventually forgive the Jewish People because He loves them held true!
This cycle of history will not go on forever because as Jews we are working towards a time when once again evil and death will be banished from the world forever with the coming of the Jewish Mashiach, the rebuilding of the Third Jewish Temple, and the arrival of the End of Days when a different and better world will be ushered in, again, based on God's forgiveness and His love for the Jewish People.
* Ki Tisa means "When you count" from Exodus 30:12 "When you count the heads of the Children of Israel..."
Contact Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin at: izakrudomin@gmail.com