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Parshat Ki Tissa
2007
Relationship Based Engagement – Biblical Style
One of life’s great tensions is differentiating between “normal” and “special” in our everyday relationships. We certainly long for and need both types of relationships for our psyches and to equilibrate out lives. The daily routines and the familiar acquaintances of a typical day allow us to appreciate the chance meeting with a long-lost friend, while the sporadic meetings with people who enter and leave our lives make us yearn for the people who are our constants. And without a doubt, there are certainly times when the lines between our “normal” and “special” relationships bleed and blur into one another. Who hasn’t struggled with a lifelong friend moving far away or the challenge of developing a relationship with an acquaintance that becomes a permanent fixture in your life with minimal warning?
At the beginning of the Torah portion Ki Tisa, Moses is presented with this same challenge. Midway through the portion, we learn that Moses is furious with the Jewish people for building a golden calf to worship while he was on Mount Sinai speaking to God and receiving the watchwords of the Jewish faith. To punish the Jews for their behavior, Moses burned the golden calf, ground it into powder and forced them to drink it, while God struck the Jewish people with a plague for their sin, resulting in the deaths of nearly three thousand people. In addition to the physical manifestations of anger, Moses and God’s relationship was deeply affected by this incident. God’s trust in the Jewish people had been shaken. Subsequently, God told Moses that instead of guiding the Jewish people into Israel, an angel would help lead the way.
Without a doubt, Moses was furious with his people. But in this instance, Moses’ most significant dilemma was not deciding what tactical actions to take to make the Jewish people understand their transgression. Instead, Moses faced a strategic challenge because the Jewish people’s deviant behavior disequillibrated his relationship with God. Moses’ relationship with God became less special and started becoming more normal.
In spite of his simmering anger, Moses recognized that he needed to do something to recalibrate the tenuous relationship with God. So like Abraham, Moses engaged God in a candid conversation. To address the tactical side of their relationship, Moses told God how uncomfortable he was with their changing relationship and felt that because he “knew [God] by name” and since “God found favor in [Moses’] eyes” both he and the Jewish people still deserved a steady, covenantal relationship (Exodus 33:12). Moses also asked how the Jewish people would know that they were God’s chosen people if God decided not lead them. Implicitly, Moses addressed the strategic side of his relationship with God by providing tangible evidence that God’s threats of disassociation from the Jewish people made their relationship less special and more normal. God was swayed by Moses’ arguments, let Moses feel God’s goodness as it passed before him and told Moses that God had a place for Moses and the Jewish people.
Rashi, a famous biblical commentator of the 11th century CE, notes that this interaction allowed God to show Moses that God had a compassionate side for the first time and that the Israelites would “not return empty without an answer to their prayers”. What is most poignant to me about Moses’ interaction with God in Ki Tisa were not the results of God and Moses’ conversation that Rashi notes in his commentary, but the process that Moses chose to achieve those incredibly significant results. Undoubtedly, it meant a lot for Moses to regain God’s favor on behalf of the Jewish people, especially after the existential moment in the history of the Jewish people was tainted by mass idol worship. More significantly though is that Moses understood that his relationship with God and God’s relationship with the Jewish people needed to regain their special elements to be effective. Equally important, Moses confronted the problem in the same way he confronted pharaoh about letting his people go.
He asked.
In the coming week, may we cherish both the special and normal relationships in our lives. And as these relationships inevitably change – either tactically or strategically - may we have the wisdom to do as Moses did and confront these changes proactively and openly so that we can savor both the special relationships that have hints of normality and the normal relationships whose special notes ring true.
Shabbat Shalom
Written by Zach Gelman, National Student Leadership Development Associate, Israel on Campus Coalition
Learn More
Additional commentaries and text studies on Parshat Ki Tissa at MyJewishLearning.com.
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