Parshas Ki Sisa 5783
Parents often have to determine whether the lesson they’d like to teach their children is actually worth the effort. Kids make a mess, and proper chinuch dictates that you should really have them clean it up so they learn to be responsible. But after a long day, it’s not always feasible to stand watch over a cleanup project that you could just do yourself in a fraction of the time. Sometimes, the parents just clean up their kids’ messes themselves.
The Midrash Tanchumah connects the dots between this week’s parsha, telling of the tragedy of the Chet HaEgel, and this week’s maftir, encapsulating the laws of the Parah Adumah. The Midrash offers a mashal of a child who scampers away from his mother, and, crayon in hand, begins to vandalize the walls of the royal palace. The mother is forced to get to work cleaning up the mess that her child has made. This, explains the Midrash, is the reason the connection between the Golden Calf and Red Heifer, the mother cow serving as a source of purity in order to clean up the “mess” of sin brought about by the young calf.
Simply understood, the Midrash would appear to be speaking of idolatry as a form of death. Indeed, if Hashem is the true source of life, then when He is replaced with some other power or deity that, the idolater effectively cuts himself off from life itself. Enter the Parah Adumah which restores purity to one who has come in contact with a dead body.
Yet the specific type of idolatry that the Egel represented doesn’t appear to fit this template. Idolatry is usually born out of the sense that one does not need G-d any more. He enjoys health, happiness, and prosperity, and is confident that he can continue to successfully pursue them without G-d. He’s now taken with some other power or force that has removed the need to bow his head to Hashem. Idolatry is an inflation of ego to the degree that there is no longer room for G-d.
But the Golden Calf was altogether different. It wasn’t an inflation of ego, it was a deflation of ego. It wasn’t about removing Hashem from the picture, it was about the people downplaying their own ability to access Him. In the absence of Moshe, with their leader apparently gone, the Jews found themselves without a means to still engage with Hashem and fell back on practices foreign to Judaism.
The Chet HaEgel was certainly a sin. It was a colossal mess. But what makes it the sort of mess that the Parah Adumah should come clean up?
Moshe begs Hashem to forgive the people and his plea is accepted. Even better than a one-time pass, Hashem actually teaches Moshe the formula for beseeching Hashem’s mercy whenever the People will be in need of doing so in the future. As the Torah tells it, Hashem “passed before” Moshe and articulated the thirteen attributes of mercy—a description of Hashem’s kindness and forbearance that serves as the core of Slichos prayers to this day.
The act of “passing before” Moshe is striking, as it is a description of Hashem in human terms that is nearly unparalleled in the Chumash. While the Torah isn’t short on its usage of anthropomorphisms, they can usually be understood rather easily as metaphors. That Hashem took the people out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm doesn’t suggest that enormous body parts actually descended from the sky. But describing a direct interaction with Moshe in terms of physically passing before him raises more of an eyebrow.
Seizing on this oddity, Rabbi Yochanan stated:
אִלְמָלֵא מִקְרָא כָּתוּב, אִי אֶפְשָׁר לְאוֹמְרוֹ. מְלַמֵּד שֶׁנִּתְעַטֵּף הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא כִּשְׁלִיחַ צִבּוּר, וְהֶרְאָה לוֹ לְמֹשֶׁה סֵדֶר תְּפִלָּה
(:ראש השנה יז)
Had the verse not written it, it would be impossible to say it. Yet this teaches that the Holy One Blessed Be He wrapped himself [in a talis] like a prayer leader and showed Moshe the proper order of prayer.
(Rosh Hashana 17b)
It was insufficient for Hashem to simply verbally relate to Moshe how to pray. Rather, Hashem showed him how to do so in as human a display as Hashem’s infinitude could possibly muster.
Why was this necessary? Perhaps because of the specific nature of the idolatry the Jews had just committed and the unfortunate thinking that lay behind it. The Jews believed that without Moshe, they would have no ability to access Hashem. They needed to be shown how faulty that brand of thinking was. That each of them had immense potential, that they possessed an incredible ability to connect with the Divine. Hashem showed himself as nearly human so that human beings could recognize and identify with the Divine spark in each of them.
Perhaps, then, the Parah Adumah is the perfect corrective for the Chet HaEgel. Constructing an external deity was a statement that G-d was too far beyond the average person to access. This was a terrible mistake. The soul breathed into every human being is a Divine spark that resies within each person and creates the ability to emulate G-d, to walk in His ways, and to connect deeply with Him.
Believing in that reality is not an excess of ego, it’s a simple recognition of truth. To not believe in one’s own ability to achieve incredibly great things is to deny the very life force that Hashem has installed within the human being. It is a form of death. Which is precisely what the Parah Adumah is charged with cleaning up.
To be blind to the immense endowments that every human being has been gifted is an error of theological proportions. Following the greatest sin in history, Hashem recognized that the Jews’ problem was not believing in themselves too much, but too little. Humility is the recognition that our accomplishments do not live up to our enormous potential. But the denial of that ability itself, the assessment that one isn’t all that special, talented, or gifted, is far from humility. It is robbing oneself of the ability to become all that Hashem has prepared us to be.