Shabbat Ki Tissa 5785- A calf or a mishkan?
You can listen to Rabbi Deborah's sermon here or read it below.
As a teacher, my students often take my breath away. It’s one of my favourite things about learning with others, and especially about learning with young people. I adore the totally brilliant and revealing questions that children especially, not only, but especially ask. There’s a naivete that allows them to pierce through some of the things we as adults don’t see, to expose biases and assumptions, and to slaughter sacred cows because they never yet had the chance to learn what is holy or not.
I used to keep a note on my phone of brilliant questions that kids have asked in sessions- things like if Chrisitans believe Jesus is the son of God, is God his mother or father? Or, what does beget mean?
But this morning I wanted to share something that a former student wrote in his dvar torah on this morning’s parasha. When I wrote to him to ask his permission he told me he now often uses this text in teaching his own Bnei Mitzvah students. He wrote:
‘I think Moses was irresponsible leaving the Children of Israel at the bottom of Mount Sinai even if he thought he left Aaron in charge. If our teachers left us unattended in the playground just with prefects and we did things we weren’t supposed to, it would be considered their fault and not ours. The people who said let's build a calf were the kind of leader I think I’d like to be. They saw that Moses had let them down, and that his promises to return weren’t really enough. I think they understood people’s fears, and they tried to use their energy constructively so that the community didn’t fall apart.
Moses was too quick to judge them, he made them at fault because he didn’t want to accept that he had failed. When people are scared or uncertain they need some help, it’s not ok to tell them just to wait and wait. I want to be a leader who doesn’t just wait for someone else to solve a problem. I want to be someone who feels empowered to make change. I actually think that what the people who built the golden calf did is the same as what reform judaism does, because it is about helping people make sense of the challenges they are having and providing a solution that helps them’.
I mean its brilliant, it’s empathetic, insightful, wise beyond its years, and I also found myself slightly tearing my hair out reading it, as the voice of our tradition and the voice of detractors who hate what we are as reform Jews came booming into my ears from opposite directions.
So let’s unpick for a minute. What’s hard about this take from a classical Jewish perspective? Well, it seems to justify idol worship, which if there was a single commandment you could boil Jewish distinctiveness down to it would be the belief in one god, the god of Israel, and the prohibition against idols or false gods that follows. It’s not a problem to be critical of Moses, in fact that’s basically what Jews do for a decent chunk of the Torah, but it crosses a big Jewish line to conclude that it’s ok to build an idol.
And then there’s the reform rabbi- or not yet rabbi as I was when I read this- who wants to affirm their student’s observation about the ability of progressive judaism to have an agility and empathy that perhaps other streams struggle with, but also retain boundaries around what is and isn’t theologically permissible.
I can see a big difference between idol worship, and some of the other things that are now such a big part of our Jewish normality that we take for granted how beautiful and radical they are - like having women rabbis - but there are others who would look at our Judaism and say there is no difference, and who accuse us of the same hubris and arrogance that led to the building of the calf.
The golden calf is the archetype of an idol, and that’s helpful because it helps us to actually explore for a minute what the fundamental issue with an idol or a false god is. When the Israelites built the calf, they didn’t say here’s another god, they said this calf is the god who brought you out of Egypt. And that, of course, is a lie. Which is in essence what an idol is, it’s a lie. It claims to be one thing, but it isn’t the thing that it promises to be. So it isn’t benign, because it’s a scam, it’s a fraud that denies people something that they deserve, it obscures access to actual meaning through its deception.
The prohibition against idol worship isn’t just about God wanting control, I think it’s a more fundamental underpinning of all of Jewish thought than that, it’s about depth and integrity and it’s about substance over artifice.
I think the building of the golden calf introduces an idea back into our tradition in a more Jewish and less universalistic context than the earlier story of the tower of babel- the other famous building project in the bible that gets knocked down- that not all things that people build for understandable reasons are good.
There was a tendency of modernist thought to assume that all innovation, all progress is inherently good, and one of the defining characteristics of our post-modern world is the ability to be a bit more skeptical about that. Progress is complicated, the new is valuable but we can have conversations about it where we can both uphold the principles behind something and critique the outcome.
I suspect some of you have a sense of where I’m going with this, because the Jews are at it again, they’re building. And specifically, our Jews, the progressive ones the reform and liberal movements, in quite a significant and important way that is going to fundamentally shift the Jewish landscape for - well forever.
And, it’s time for us as a shul to make a choice, is this building project, a new progressive movement- something we are in for, or something that sounds like a good idea, but risks bringing some of the challenges embedded in today’s parasha into a more modern context?
When my husband and I got married, Rabbi Miriam joked under the chuppah about the two of us- rabbis at two of the largest reform and liberal shuls- doing it to make the case for a merger between the movements. I guess we barely see any day to day difference between our Judaisms, but our shuls are different, but not in a way that has much to do with our movements.
We’re both in shuls on the creative and open minded end of the movement spectra, both with pretty strong histories and cultures, but we’re way more similar to his shul than we are to some reform shuls, and they’re way more similar to us than they are to some other liberal ones.
The differences between shuls are harder to discern, the differences between the movement super structures, more clear. We’ve got lots to learn from each other, and yet if you’re starting to follow the unfolding public face of this debate between clergy, many of whom are giving sermons this shabbat in their communities about their particular take on things, you’ll see that there are some important dissenting voices.
People are worried about whether the movement will be able to be as radical and forward thinking as the liberal movement has been in the past, or as diverse and appealing to mainstream voices as they feel the reform movement has tried to be. There are the inevitable conversations about votes, and money, and who gets to be in charge and who decides.
I’m finding the debate fascinating, because the thing that continually strikes me, and I felt again as I read all the paperwork we’ve been sent to review as a shul is that we don’t actually know that much about the new movement at all.
We know why it’s been argued that it is a good idea to merge- that our voices and values are much stronger if they are better organised and amplified, that our resources are better spent if they are shared rather than duplicated, that our internal perceived divisions are invisible to outsiders and cause us to naval gaze rather than look outwards, that it's possible to create a shared something that isn't a monolith. But aside from a skeleton structure, what we’re actually being asked to vote on is a promise and a hope.
And that’s why I think it’s a hard conversation. We know what it’ll cost us for three years- broadly what it costs now- and we know about the structures that will exist for work to be done- a board and a forum of members, with decisions still to be made about whether we remain as two rabbinic bodies or merge into one. But we know absolutely nothing yet of how this will change things for us religiously, what the movement’s theology is. We know only what substance it is being made from and not what form it will take.
If your concerns about things Jews build were shaped by the cautionary tale of the calf, I absolutely understand why being asked to vote on a promise feels like a dangerous leap of faith.
The golden calf is not the only thing built by crowd sourcing from Jews in this section of Torah. Beginning today and continuing next week, we read the story of the calf’s counterfoil- the mishkan. According to Rashi, it’s the corrective for the misstep of the calf. Another building project, another focal point for community, also built by collecting in gold and other goods from the assembled community.
The mishkan was a meeting place for ritual life, for convening with god, and it travelled. Unlike the calf, it was mobile. For me, the challenge inherent in building this movement is set up in the distinction between the calf and the mishkan.
The calf was an empty promise of a solid and clear solution. It looked finished, established and firm. And that’s what made it an idol. The mishkan has fancy fabrics, and a nice ark for the covenant, but it’s basically just a nice tent. Most of the substance and meaning comes from the way that the people use it. The holiness of the mishkan is in it’s role as a gathering place, a focal point, somewhere that can move and remind the Israelites that God is not fixed, but that can hold them together nonetheless.
Our new movement is much more like a mishkan than a calf, or at least I hope it will be. There is some work to do to get everything ready for us to be able to vote an enthusiastic yes on the merger, but for me it’s the fact that we are able to do the work and invited to fill in the substance and co-create what the next chapter of our Jewish life looks like that makes it a difficult proposition as well as a good one.
I would be deeply suspicious of a fait accompli, of a small group of people presenting something that was so clear and so rigid and so firm that there was absolutely no room for any of us to actually be part of it.
I have questions, pretty big ones about finances and about leadership which we as a shul have ample chance to share with the project leaders once we’ve collected all of our feedback, but they aren’t rooted in opposition to the project, rather the opposite.
I want this to happen and I want it to happen well with enthusiastic buy in and depth of engagement, and that means the process we’re in right now where everyone is asking lots of questions and exploring and challenging is good. It's essential for cultivating the passion that a project like this relies on but also requires an awful lot of nerve holding.
We aren’t building a calf, we’re building a mishkan, and that means all of the messiness and participation of shared ritual and constantly moving communities and none of the closedness and fixedness of idol making.
The leaders of the movement are asking for our buy in and our trust, they’re making a promise, and they’re asking us to give them our confidence that it is not a vacant or empty one. The reason I’m sharing this here is that I was reflecting on how many past movement chairs and board members and movement workers have come from FRS, and it’s loads.
To talk about ‘the movement’ as a fixed object that is elsewhere is something we’ve become lazy and used to doing, but it turns it into a rigid and inaccessible structure -much more calf like in our thinking than anyone would want it to be -and that means its a constant disappointment, because we can only project onto it things that it can never be.
In this moment we have a chance to step into seeing ourselves as a shul and as individuals who are voices in this exciting project of building a mishkan - a gathering place for all progressive jews to act together in holy work - and claim our right to shape it, so that we can be proud participants in and leaders of this exciting next stage on taking our people forwards in the wilderness of the 21st century and beyond.
