In this week’s parsha, Ki Tisa, we find our people encamped at Mount Sinai only months into a journey that will last forty years. As they wait for their leader Moses to descend with God’s word, the Israelities quickly lose patience. Our parsha describes how they respond to extended waiting and uncertainty in two distinct ways. In a constructive response, the Israelites work together to build the Mishkan. They join their donations and talents together and create an accessible holy space to worship God. But in an alternative response, driven by fear and isolation, the Israelites become a frenzied mob, melting down their jewelry to build a Golden Calf.
Some midrashim say that the incident of the golden calf actually took place before the people received instructions to construct the mishkan, and that these Torah passages are chronologically out of order. The mishkan project logically could have been a response to the error of the Golden idol. It allowed for the Israelites to use their energy more appropriately, and still gave them a physical focal point for the intangible God they needed to feel close to. But the Torah places the instructions for the mishkan before the golden calf, and the actual construction after.
In this way, the Torah pivots back and forth between a story of constructive creativity and desperate reactivity to uncertainty. Sound familiar? As we dance between delay and regather, plan and pivot, for an extended amount of time, you may have noticed your own bursts of creativity and motivation to learn contrast with reactive responses of fear, and despair- the crying in the shower moments. I’m holding deep compassion for my own moments of hopelessness, or numbness, but am not content to let our vision for Jewish community remain there.
After the outburst of the Golden Calf, God could have easily abandoned the people indefinitely. But Moses convinces God to forgive and teaches that what we need instead of fear is a productive sort of patience. The construction of the mishkan, a temporary holy space, honored the Israelites’ need to make progress towards a better future, while acknowledging the tranciense of their circumstances. There was no holiness in the rushed, mob-like impulse to build a golden calf. Instead, we needed to honor patience and name the waiting space as Holy by making it meaningful together.
By Rabbi Laura Rumpf