I wasn’t going to go
there. I rebelled as it repelled. With much to struggle with in the weekly
Torah portion called Ki Tissa (Ex.
30:11-34:35), and much to uplift, I was not going to go to its lowest point of
encounter with Torah, with life, with God, with Moshe. It is with Moshe with
whom there is the greatest struggle here. I have tried hard over the years to
embrace Moshe, having once struggled with him, hard for me at times to seek out
the teacher, Moshe as Rabbeinu/our Rabbi/our teacher, to feel
at ease with him, comfortable asking questions, challenging him and still
loving. And now there is this, anger worse than when he later hits the rock
when asked by God only to speak to it, and of greater consequence, at least for
others if not for him.


How does such horror
unfold? How can people carry out such violence? These are the same questions we
ask when we read or hear the day’s news. How? Why? Struggling with these
questions in the controlled context of Torah, as we are meant to struggle, we
learn to struggle with the same questions as they assault us in the world.
Then we come back to the beginning of the verse, when Moses calls the people together and the tribe of Levi gathers. Moses says to them, ko amar ha’shem/thus says God…. And then we look, and we look again, and again, and we realize that God has not spoken of this, that God has not told Moshe to so hideously command the people. And then I realized why I had to go there, to come to this verse that repelled me, precisely in order to rebel, to cry out, to say no, that is not what God said, not then, not now. There are commentators who justify, who see the command as implicit, such killing, God forbid, as a cleansing after the sin of the golden calf. It is not dissimilar to justifying and rationalizing violence in so many realms of our lives today, too often avoiding our own complicity. It is hard not to see the slaughter, as other commentators do, as vigilante justice, as what amounts to extra-judicial killings.
Only in entering the “harsh passages”
of Torah, as Rabbeinu/our teacher Heschel so aptly calls them,
do we learn to wrestle with violence and learn how to transcend violence, first
in Torah, and then in life. Bravely entering the places we would prefer not to
go, we encounter others who struggle, learning from their wrestlings, joining
ours with theirs across time and space, becoming a timeless movement for
justice, peace, wholeness, and gentleness, finding with their help our own
voice with which to cry out, to challenge.
Then we come back to the beginning of the verse, when Moses calls the people together and the tribe of Levi gathers. Moses says to them, ko amar ha’shem/thus says God…. And then we look, and we look again, and again, and we realize that God has not spoken of this, that God has not told Moshe to so hideously command the people. And then I realized why I had to go there, to come to this verse that repelled me, precisely in order to rebel, to cry out, to say no, that is not what God said, not then, not now. There are commentators who justify, who see the command as implicit, such killing, God forbid, as a cleansing after the sin of the golden calf. It is not dissimilar to justifying and rationalizing violence in so many realms of our lives today, too often avoiding our own complicity. It is hard not to see the slaughter, as other commentators do, as vigilante justice, as what amounts to extra-judicial killings.

The voice of a teacher
thunders in disbelief from the school of Elijah, so carried as though to be
registered as a cry of protest in the work of midrash called Tana d’vei
Eliyahu/A Teacher of the School of Elijah:
I call heaven and earth to witness before me, that
the Holy Blessed One did not say to Moshe to stand in the gate of the camp and
say, ‘whoever is for God come to me, and let each one put their sword upon
their thigh and let each one kill their brother, and their friend, and their
relative;’ and he said ‘thus says God, the God of Israel….’ Rather, it was
Moshe himself who so judged and said in his heart, ‘if I say to Israel that
each one should kill their brother, their friend, their relative, Israel will
consider and they will say to me, ‘this is not what you have taught us, our
teacher/lo kach limaditanu rabbeinu’ (Tana
d’vei Eliyahu, Seder Eliyahu Rabba 4:1).
And even if God had said
it, then as well to remind, “this is not what you have taught us, our teacher!”
Fittingly, drawing on an ancient legacy of protest, the midrash from the school of Elijah appears in commentary to the
Torah portion Vayera in which Abraham
challenges God (Gen. 18) not to destroy the innocent with the guilty in the
violent cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, our ancestor’s words amplified by the
teacher in the study hall of Elijah and come to us, “shall the judge of all the
earth not do justice?!”

It is from that confidence in what we have learned from God, from Torah, from Moses, from our own experience, that Rabbeinu Heschel speaks of our approach to the “harsh passages,” those “which seem to be incompatible with our certainty of the compassion of God. In analyzing this extremely difficult problem, we must first of all keep in mind that the standards by which those passages are criticized are impressed upon us by the Bible, which is the main factor in ennobling our conscience and in endowing us with the sensitivity that rebels against all cruelty…” (God in Search of Man, p. 268). He reminds us that the “harsh passages” do not represent abiding values, that they are not prescribed as a way of behavior, “that they stand in sharp contrast with the compassion, justice, and wisdom of the laws that were legislated for all times” (ibid).

Through the words of a
long ago teacher, there is ironic hope in Moshe’s recognition that the people
have integrated the very teaching that he himself would violate. Such is the
power of the people to remind leaders of what God most wants when a leader
turns from the path of righteousness, justice, and decency. We need to have
enough grounding and faith in the very Torah that we learn and love, and so for
each people’s holiest books and highest ideals, to know how to challenge from
within whatever violates its own ideals and ultimate values. Entering the harsh
passages, we learn to struggle and to look deeply at who we are and are meant
to be. We look at the values that have shaped us in our core and given expression
to the ideals that define us as a people, for which we have been known in the
world. We learn from the very sources of our ideals, from our texts and their
teachers, to know in our souls when the essence of the sources themselves, and
of their Source, is violated. We know from all the way back when God’s spirit
is violated, even by God, from that gentle beginning when the breath of God
hovered over the face of the waters. In that knowing, so shall we have the
courage to say when necessary, this is
not what you have taught us, our teacher/lo kach limaditanu rabbeinu.
Rabbi Victor H. Reinstein
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