Art by Mike Cockrill
There’s a tradition of doing learning in honor of someone who has died, so I’d like to do this drash in honor of the memory of Rabbi Jeff Marker.
So Ki Tissa. This is a fabulous parsha, my favorite by far and it’s an honor to do a drash on it. A lot happens in this parsha, but I’d like to concentrate this week on two parts of it, the story of the Golden Calf, and the moment when Moses asks to see God.
Moses is up on Mount Sinai, getting the Torah and the laws from God, and this is a task that takes time. The people are just recently out of slavery, and they’re still used to living under authoritarians who discourage critical thinking, to put it nicely, but they have learned to trust Moses, who has delivered them out of Egypt, across the Sea of Reeds, made sure they were fed and led them to where they expect to hear from their God. Moses sees them, he knows them and they know him. But then he’s gone, for weeks, and they are afraid. Their lives in Eqypt were awful but at least they knew who they were and where they belonged. Now here, at the foot of a mountain in a scary desert, everything they knew is no more. And the one person who they had faith in, gone.
They are alone. They don’t yet understand the idea of God’s presence, how that can be with them even if they can’t see it in a concrete form like an idol. So they ask Aaron to create a substitute, something they can see, which can be worshipped the way gods are worshipped in Egypt, and for a moment they experience relief. It feels like home.
I’ve been there. Doubt was definitely not an act of faith at the Westbury Hebrew Congregation back in the day. So I declared myself an atheist at 14 and ran screaming from it all. But I had believed it when I was little. And I liked it, even loved it. I mean, I read the books they gave us cover to cover and I even had a crush on David the king and Rabbi Akiva, god I was such a nerd. But they reached in with their illogical sexist dogma and scooped my love for Judaism out of me and put nothing in its place. So, in me there was a hole where faith had been. But it wanted to be filled, which I did, sort of, with various ideologies and causes, but never enough. I wanted to feel God’s presence. I moved to Seattle and built my own Golden Calf as I tried to morph into a blonde scandanavian. Yeah. It didn’t work. I simply didn’t know yet that if I wanted to, I could find a life that was Jewish, where I could ask questions, where I could be an artist and a socialist and a feminist and a mystic and a Jew all at the same. But eventually I found my way out of Egypt. And I came to the promised land: Brooklyn.
A little later in the parsha, after the debacle of the Golden Calf, in Chapter 33, verse 18, Moses speaks to God and says,
“Oh let me behold your presence!”
And God answers, “I will make all my goodness pass before you.”, continuing, but you cannot see my face, for a human being may not see my face and live.
So God had Moses position himself in a cleft of a rock and shields him with God’s metaphorical hand as God passes by.
The torah does not record what Moses thought of what he saw, which is the most mindblowing part of Ki Tissa, in my opinion. So much of this parsha, including other stuff in Ki Tissa I’m not talking about today, is about seeing or being seen by your leaders or by God or by what you hope is God, (and when I say God I mean whatever that means for you, it might be a concept, a metaphor, a myth, a connection, an inner knowingness, an old man with a white beard sitting on a throne in the clouds, indescribable, unnameable) and more relevant, vitally important and central to Moses in every way, yet in the one passage in which Moses actually sort of sees God, we don’t hear a word about the experience. Nothing from torah, not a word from Moses. Perhaps experiencing God or Godness or connection doesn’t always need to be described? I will have to look into this
Then this makes me think about the Kaddish, which is used in many different forms and on many more occasions than as the mourner’s kaddish, which is probably how most of you know it. I’m teaching a class in it right now so it’s on my mind, particularly the fact that it doesn’t name or address God directly, that all its praise is directed at God’s name, a name that is invented to use instead of Adonai or Elohim, which are names invented to use instead of the name spelled, Yud Hey Vuv Hey, that we’re not supposed to say out loud but which kind of means, I Am That I Am, but is also a substitute for the real name of God which nobody knows anymore because we’re not supposed to know it so we forgot it. And yet this Kaddish, is used, among other things, to comfort us after a death, though there is absolutely no mention of death in it. I used to think this was bizarre, but now I see it as beautiful, as a way to remind us that no matter how sad we are, we are all still connected to God’s presence, through praise and mindfulness, that in our most lonely times we can be in conversation with our history and our spirituality, and that that holy connection can be found in a cleft of a rock, at the foot of Sinai, or a shul in Brooklyn, sitting together in community, like right now. God is passing over us. We just have to pay attention.
Shema!
Adonai Echad,
Baruch HaShem
Yud Hey Vuv Hey
Shechinah
Yah
El Shaddai
Fierce Mystery
Holy Wholeness
One-ness
Is us.
With our eyes closed
We see and we are seen
As God’s presence passes over us.
Open your eyes.
Amen
